Simone raised her head; her cheeks had reddened a little at Madame Branchard's last words. She was unable to grasp the benefits that Bulstrode's magnificence offered, but she knew Marie and Jeannette—she knew the hands of Madame Branchard could tuck one in at night, and how warm and soft was the bosom on which she had already wept her little griefs. There were many beautiful things in the world, but Simone just then only wanted one. Madame Branchard was not her mother—but she was still a mother! Simone whispered so low that only the woman heard:
"I will go with you."
Prosper having embarked on a sea of indiscretion, went through the day consistently. With a love of the melodramatic in his Latin temperament he had admitted the hôtel meublé sans cérémonie: and late that afternoon he gave entrance to another group of quite a different order, and without formality ushered the lady and her friends to the terrace, where the solitary inhabitant of another man's house was taking a farewell beverage before leaving Paris.
"We have caught you in time, Jimmy!" Mrs. Falconer made a virtue of it. "If you are absconding with the Montensier treasures, then let me show Molly and the Marquis at least what has been left behind."
His bags and boxes in the hall, his automobile at the door, and Bulstrode himself in travelling trim, it looked very much like a flight, indeed. Miss Molly and the Marquis, it transpired, were able to explore for themselves and to find in the gallery and salons pictures and objects of interest to excuse a prolonged absence.
"They're engaged," Mrs. Falconer explained to her host. "Isn't it ridiculous? As you know, she hasn't a cent in the world, and his family are not in the secret, but Molly and De Presle-Vaulx are, and I am, and I brought them off in pity for a spin to Paris."
The apparition of the lady, whose mocking beauty had a fresh charm every time he saw her—her worldly wisdom and her keen reasonableness—made, as he stood talking with her, his past debauch in philanthropies seem especially grotesque. With a long breath of joy at the sight of her Bulstrode also realized how wonderfully separated from her the introduction of another life into his environment would have made him.
"Your garden is a waste," the lady criticised, "dusty and dull. I don't wonder you're getting away. Fontainebleau, too, was only a faute de mieux, and I have left it. One should get really far away at this season. It's the time when only the persons who are actually bred in its stones can stay in Paris—certainly the birds of passage may now, if ever, fly."
"We are going to Trouville," she said; "we are all going to motor through Normandy. Won't you come—won't you come?" He shook his head.
Mrs. Falconer looked across the terrace to where a little chair had been overturned, and on the floor by its side lay a broken doll.