"Jimmy!" she laughed in triumph at the sight. "You have broken your doll!"
Bulstrode said: "Yes, beyond repair, and I don't want another." Then in a few words, briefly, a little impatient, and still smarting under the child's defection, he gave her the story.
Listening, absorbed, her charming eyes on him or at one moment turned suspiciously away, the lady heard him to the end, and at the end said softly:
"Jimmy, my poor Jimmy! What have you nearly done! What would people have thought? Not that it matters in the least—it's what people do that counts—but oh, I tremble for your next folly!"
"It might"—he spoke with something like bitterness—"be less harmless and leave me less alone."
She had finished a glass of iced tea, put her goblet down on the tray and rose, coming over to where Bulstrode stood; she lightly laid her hand on his arm.
"You are, then, so very lonely? So lonely that you would be capable of doing this foolish thing? Oh, you would have found, as I have found, that it is those things which come into our lives, not those which we by force take, which mean all we want them to mean! This wasn't your child!" Mrs. Falconer's face softened as he had never seen it. "Nor yet is she the child of some woman you love. Believe me, it would have made you far lonelier if it so happened—if you should ever come to love—if you ever had loved——"
Bulstrode interrupted her abruptly:
"Yes, in that case I should no doubt be glad that Simone had gone back on me." He waited silent for a second, and then continued gently, "I am glad, very glad indeed!"