lone, Madame, the gardens
are deserted. What can I do for you?"

As he so spoke in his kind voice the woman lifted her head and looked
full at him; Bulstrode was surprised at her words and more particularly
at her voice.

"You--" she breathed, "you?"

Taking it for granted that for some reason or other it might be him
more than any other man, Bulstrode went on. "You seem more or less to
be in trouble, if I may say so. Won't you please let me be of some
service to you--let me at least see you out of these gloomy gardens?"

But the woman, whose face had flushed, exclaimed: "Oh, no, no! Please
don't bother; please leave me. I want to be alone." And, as she
spoke, she turned and went away from him some few steps.

Jimmy Bulstrode never knew what impulse made him spring forward and
with one sudden gesture dash from her hand what it held. But the
little object fell some distance away, hard down in the grass, to be
found the next morning by the guardians of the place and considered as
a relic of the fortunes of Casino hazard.

"Heavens!" exclaimed the gentleman, and he caught in his hand the
slender wrist from which he had just dashed the weapon. "My good God!
You poor child, why, why----" and he could go no further. The woman's
face, although moved, was singularly tranquil for the face of a woman
on the verge of self-destruction.

"Won't you leave me," she whispered and Bulstrode, gathering himself
together, said firmly:

"Leave you? Not now, certainly, not for anything in the world. And
you must let me take you home."

After a few moments' silence in which she bit her lip and apparently
controlled a burst of hysterical weeping, the young woman accepted his
offer and very lightly put her hand on his arm. "You may, if you
like," she consented, "take me home, as you call it. I am staying at
the Hotel des Roches Noires."

From the Casino gardens through the silent town without exchanging one
word with her--for he saw she wished to be silent--Jimmy took the lady,
as he called it, home. Once in the big corridor of the vast hotel,
into whose impersonal shelter they entered as the only late comers, he
stood for a second before bidding her good-night, whilst the porter
eyed them, scarcely with curiosity, so used was he to late entrances of
this kind which he imagined he fully understood.

"Good-night--" Bulstrode started and at once cut himself short, for he
did not really intend to say it then--he had no