s side lay a broken doll.

"Jimmy!" she laughed in triumph at the sight. "You _have_ broken your
doll!"

Bulstrode said: "Yes, beyond repair, and I don't want another." Then
in a few words, briefly, a little impatient, and still smarting under
the child's defection, he gave her the story.

Listening, absorbed, her charming eyes on him or at one moment turned
suspiciously away, the lady heard him to the end, and at the end said
softly:

"Jimmy, my poor Jimmy! What have you nearly done! What _would_ people
have thought? Not that it matters in the least--it's what people _do_
that counts--but oh, I tremble for your next folly!"

"It might"--he spoke with something like bitterness--"be less harmless
and leave me less alone."

She had finished a glass of iced tea, put her goblet down on the tray
and rose, coming over to where Bulstrode stood; she lightly laid her
hand on his arm.

"You are, then, so very lonely? So lonely that you would be capable of
doing this foolish thing? Oh, you would have found, as I have found,
that it is those things which come into our lives, not those which we
by force _take_, which mean all we want them to mean! This wasn't
_your child_!" Mrs. Falconer's face softened as he had never seen it.
"Nor yet is she the child of some woman you love. Believe me, it would
have made you far lonelier if it so happened--if you should ever come
to love--if you ever had loved----"

Bulstrode interrupted her abruptly:

"Yes, in that case I should no doubt be glad that Simone had gone back
on me." He waited silent for a second, and then continued gently, "I
_am_ glad, very glad indeed!"

THE FOURTH ADVENTURE

IV

IN WHICH HE MAKES THREE PEOPLE HAPPY

There were times when Bulstrode decided that he never could see the
woman he loved any more: there were times when he felt he must follow
her to the ends of the world, just in order to assure himself that she
was alive and serene. Such is the gentleman's character and point of
view, that she must always be serene, no matter what his own troubled
emotions might be.

He had the extraordinary idea that he could not himself be happy or
make a woman happy over the dishonor of another man. It was
old-fashioned and unworldly of Bulstrode: still, that was the way he
was constituted.

It was on one of the imperious occasions when he felt as if he must
follow her to the ends of the earth, that he steered his craft toward a
little tow