grow strange. He wanted to
rub his eyes. She appeared singularly to appreciate his daze.

"It is as strange to me as it is to you, to find myself here with a man
to whom I have never spoken before--to be under his protection, and to
talk with him like this; and yet I have seen you so often, I have
watched you in the distance, and long since I singled you out as the
one man in whom I could fancy confiding--the one man to whom I could
give a sacred trust."

With these words the incognita drew herself up, and her manner, with
amazing swiftness, changed from a childlike confidence to a dignity not
without a certain rigidness, and as Bulstrode remarked this, he also
noticed that she was very young, and he was conscious in her of a
something he had never quite met in a woman before--an extreme dignity,
an ultra poise, an assurance.--Who was she?--And whom did she take him
to be? With every turn of the fast wheels of the express it was
growing more difficult to explain. She would more keenly feel the fact
that he had not cut her frankness short--he had no right to her
confidences even though she took their mutual knowledge of each other
for granted.

"When," he ventured it delicately--"did you last see me?" It was bold,
but it did perfectly.

"Oh, an age ago, isn't it? You were last on the Continent I think in
August at Trouville, during La Grande Semaine."

Ah, he reflected, _of course_! _That_ was where, amongst so many other
celebrities and beauties, she had attracted his attention. But his
rapid mental calculations of those seven days could reveal to him no
woman's face but one. He found himself even in this unique moment
recalling the time following hard on Molly's formal engagement to her
Marquis ... and those days were amongst the brightest in his life. No,
there had been no foreign element at Trouville for him in the dazzle
and freedom of that worldly fortnight--for Jimmy Bulstrode, in all the
scene she summoned up, there was but one woman. He came back with a
start to the other.

"Then yesterday, as you passed our table at the Carlton, and it seemed
as if heaven had sent you to us to help us--at least so we both felt."

And Bulstrode doubtfully smiled and, now determined, broke in, or would
have done so, but she waved him imperiously.

"Your mind," she spoke indulgently, "is on the wrong side to-day. Try
to think only of the happiness towards which I am going so rapidly, so
rapidly." Then, as sh