And then the lady stepped back and looked at him. He felt, before that she had merely swept him with her eyes; now she looked at him. She cried his name out—"Jimmy!"—that was all.
But in the exclamation, in the change of her mobile face, in the lovely gesture that her hand made, as if it would have gone to his, Bulstrode was forced to feel himself eminently, gloriously repaid, and it is not too much to say that he did.
THE FIFTH ADVENTURE
V
IN WHICH HE MAKES NOBODY HAPPY AT ALL
Bulstrode stood before the entrance of the Hôtel de Paris bidding his friends good-night. Watching them, at least one of them, enter in under the shelter of the glass pavilion, he considered how much more lonely he was at that special moment than he could remember having been before. Of course he had bidden Mary Falconer good-night a hundred dozen times in the course of his life, but it seemed to come with a more sublime significance than ever how he gave her up every time he said good-by and how he was himself left alone. And yet, had Mrs. Falconer been asked, she would have said that she never found her friend more cold and more constrained. In his correct evening dress with the flower she herself had given him in his buttonhole, his panama in his hand, he had been absorbed in her beauty, in the grace of her dark dress, bright with scintillating ornaments—her big feathered hat under which her face was more lovely, more alluring than ever; and nothing in his eyes told the woman what he thought and felt.
She touched his arm, saying:
"Look, Jimmy."
"Isn't that the lovely woman we've so often remarked? See, she's all alone, how curious! She's going over to the Casino to play, I suppose. What can have happened to the man who has been with her all this time? Where is the Prince Pollona?"