Bulstrode hesitated; then said, "I do not know."
"Not know?" cried the girl, "you don't know?"
It was with the greatest difficulty that Bulstrode could at any time bring to his lips even the name of the woman he loved. At this moment the vision of her as he had seen her lately on her husband's arm going in under the pavilion of the hôtel crossed his mind with a cruel despair and cruel disgust. A sense of his solitude, of his defrauded life, rushed over him as he looked into the eyes of this woman who loved him.
"No," he said intensely, "I do not know, I do not know. I have a code of honor a million years old, but I live up to it. She is a wife, I have never told her that I love her."
The girl's incredulity and surprise were great. It showed in the smile which, something like happiness, crossed her lips. She drew a long breath; she held his eyes with hers, then she laid both her arms around his neck and Bulstrode bent and kissed her. He held her for one moment and his heart, if it beat for another woman, beat hard and fast and its pulse ran through her own. Then Felicia heard the door close and the footsteps of the man died away.
It was seven o'clock when Bulstrode found himself out in the streets. The fresh air in a keen, salt wind poured over him. Down on the beach, for a couple of francs he bribed an attendant to open a bath-house for him, and a few moments later, shivering a little in the keen air, he could have been seen running down to the sea, and in a few moments more his strong swift strokes had carried him far out into the waters which the summer sun even at this early hour was fast turning into blue.
When Jimmy came to himself, he found that without either seeing Mrs. Falconer again or having even bidden a decent good-bye or godspeed to his fiancée, he was back again in Paris. He had run away. Well, that wasn't any new thing, he was always at it. Paris, in the month of August, gave him a hot, desolate welcome, and it was with difficulty that he could find a lawyer who would help him down to bedrock and put in motion the business of winding up the affairs of Molly and her Marquis.
De Presle-Vaulx came to town and found his champion there and brought him many messages from the ladies as well as a letter which Bulstrode put in his pocket to read down in the country at the château of Vaulxgoron in the seclusion of his own room.
Bulstrode played the part of the "American Uncle" to perfection. He let the old Marquis beat him at backgammon; he wandered all over the property with the Marquise. He bought the young man for Molly Malines and closed up his beneficent affairs in a very decent manner indeed, but on the night when Mrs. Falconer and Miss Malines should have arrived at the château, Bulstrode ran away again. From then on he became a wandering Jew. He ran up to Norway, fished a little, then took a motor and some people, who did not know any one whom he had ever known, and drove them through Italy. He continued to travel a little longer, working his way northward until finally—so he put it—dusty as "Dusty Dog Dingo," tired as "Tired Dog Dingo," Bulstrode found himself in London, drew a deep breath and capitulated.