There was never in the world a better fellow than Jimmy Bulstrode. If he had been poorer his generosities would have ruined him over and over again. He was always being taken in, was the recipient of hundreds of begging letters, which he hired another soft-hearted person to read. He offended charitable organizations by never passing a beggar's outstretched hand without dropping a coin in it. He was altogether a distressingly impracticable rich person, surrounded by people who admired him for what he really was and by those who tried to squeeze him for what he was worth!

It was a general wonder to people who knew him slightly why Bulstrode had never married. The gentleman himself knew the answer perfectly, but it amused him to discuss the question in spite of the pain, as well as for the pleasure that it caused him to consider—the reason why.

Mary Falconer, the woman he loved, was the wife of a man of whom Bulstrode could only think in pitiful contempt. But, thanks to an element of chivalry in the character of the hero of this story the years, as time went on, spread back of both the woman and the man in an honorable series, of whose history neither one had any reason to be ashamed.

Nevertheless, it struck them both as rather humorous, after all, that of the three concerned her husband should be the only renegade and, notwithstanding, profit by the combined good faith of his wife and the man who loved her.

Oh, there was nothing easy in the task that Jimmy set for himself! And it did not facilitate matters that Mary Falconer scarcely ever helped him in the least! She was a beautiful woman, a tender woman, and there were times when her friend felt that she cleverly and cruelly taunted him with Puritanism and with his simple, old-fashioned ideas and crystal clearness of vision, the culte he had regarding marriage and the sacred way in which he held bonds and vows. It was no help at all to think she rebelled and jested at his reserve; that she did her best to break it—and there were times when it was a brilliant siege. But down in her heart she respected him, and as she saw around her the domestic wrecks with which the matrimonial seas are encumbered, and knew that her own craft promised to go safely through the storm, Mary Falconer more than once had been grateful to the man.

As far as Bulstrode himself was concerned, each year—there had been ten of them—he found the situation becoming more difficult and dangerous. Not only did the future appear to him impossible as things were, but he began to hate his arid past. He was sometimes led to ask, what, after all, was he getting out of his colossal sacrifice? The only reward he wanted was the woman herself, and, unless her husband died, she would never be his. Bulstrode had not found that he could solve the problem, and now and then he let it go from sheer weariness of heart.

In the face of the window of the drawing-room where Bulstrode sat on this afternoon of an especial winter's day the storm cast wreaths of snow that clung and froze, or dropped like feathers down against the sill. The gentleman had his predilections even in New York, and in the open fireplace the logs crumbled and disintegrated to ashen caves wherein the palpitating jewels of the heat were held. Except for this old-fashioned warmth, there was none other in the room, whose white wainscoting and pillars, low ceilings and quaint chimney-piece, characterized one of those agreeably proportioned houses still to be found in lower New York around Washington Square.

Bulstrode had received about half an hour ago a letter whose qualities and suggestions were something disturbing to him:

"There is such a thing, believe me" (Mary Falconer wrote in the pages which Bulstrode opened to read for the twentieth time), "as the gloom of Christmas, Jimmy. People won't frankly own to it. They're afraid of seeming sour and crabbed. But don't you, who are so exquisitely apt to feelings—to other people's feelings,—at once confess it? It attacks the spinster in the bustling winter streets as she is elbowed by some person, exuberantly a mother, and so arrogantly laden with delicious-looking parcels that she is almost a personal Christmas tree herself. I'm confident this 'gloom of Christmas' grips the wretched little beings at toy-shop windows as they stand 'choosin'' their never-to-be-realized toys. I'm sure it haunts the vagrant and the homeless in a city fairly redolent of holly and dinners, and where the array of other people's homes is terrifying. And, my dear friend, it is so horribly subtle that no doubt it attacks others whose only grudge is that their hearths are not built for Christmas trees or the hanging of stockings. But these unfortunates are not saying anything aloud, therefore we must not pry!

"There's a jolly house-party on at the Van Schoolings'. We're to go down to-morrow to Tuxedo and pass Christmas night, and you are, of course, asked and wanted. Knowing your dread of these family feasts—possibly from just such a ghost of the gloom—I was sure you would refuse. But it's a wonderful place for a talk or two, and I shall hope you will go—will come, not even follow, but go down with me."

There was more of the letter—there always is more of women's letters. Their minds and pens are so charmingly facile; there is nothing a woman can do better than talk, except to write.

Bulstrode smoked slowly, the pages between his fingers, his thoughts travelling like wanderers towards a home from which a ban had kept them aliens. His eyes drifted to the beginning of the letter. He wasn't familiar with the homeless vagrant class. His charities to that part of the population consisted in donations to established societies, and haphazard giving called forth by a beggar's extended hand.

If anybody may be immune to the melancholy of which his friend Mrs. Falconer spoke, it should surely be this gentleman, smoking his cigar before the fire. The unopened letters—there was a pile of them—would have offered ample reason why. No one of the lot but bore some testimony to the generous heart which, beneath dinner-jacket and behind the screw-faced watch with the picture in the back of it, beat so healthy and so well.

But the bestowal of benefits, whilst it may beautify the giver, does not always transform itself into the one benefit desired and console the bestower! Bulstrode had a charming home. He was alone in it. He had his clubs where bachelors like himself, more or less infected with Christmas gloom, would be glad to greet him. He had his friends, many of them, and their home circles were complete. His, by force of circumstances, began and ended with himself, and as if triumphant to have found so tempting a victim, the gloom came and possessed Bulstrode as he sat and mused.

But the decided sadness that stole across his face bore no relation, to the season, to whose white mystery and holy beauty there was something in his boyish, kindly heart that always responded.

The sadness Mrs. Falconer's letter awakened would not sleep. What his Christmas might be...! He had only to order his motor, to call for her and drive over the ferry; to sit beside her in the train, to drive with her again across the wintry roads. He had but to see her, watch her, talk with her, share with her the day and evening, to have his Christmas as nearly what a feast should be as dreams could ask. The whole festival was there: joy, good-will—peace? No. Not peace for him or for her—not that; everything else, but not that. And he had been travelling for five weary months in order to make himself keep for her that peace a little longer.

Bulstrode sighed here, lifted the letter where there was more of it to his lips—held it out toward the fire as if the red jewels were to set themselves around it, thought differently, and putting it back in its envelope, thrust it in the pocket of his waistcoat.

"Ruggles," he asked the servant who had come in, "you sent the despatch to Tuxedo?"

"Yes, sir."

"There'll be later a note to send. I'll ring. Well, what is it?"

"There's a person at the door, sir, who insists on seeing you."

The servant's tone—one particularly jarring to the ears of a man who had fellowship with more than one class of his kind—made the master look sharply up. Ruggles was a new addition to the household, and Bulstrode did not like him.

"A person," Bulstrode repeated, quietly; "what sort of a person?"

"A man, sir."

"Not a gentleman? No," he nodded gently; "I see you do not think him one. Yet that he is a man is in his favor. There are some gentlemen who aren't men, you know. Let him in."

In doing so Ruggles seemed to let in the night. Bulstrode had, in the warmth of his fragrant room, forgotten that outside was the wintry dark. Ruggles, in letting the man in, had the air of thrusting him in, and shut the door behind the visitor with a click.

The creature himself let in the cold; he seemed made of it. The snow clung to his shoulders; his shoes, tied up with strings, were encrusted with it. His coat, buttoned to his chin, frayed at the cuffs and edges, was thin and weather-stained. He had a pale face, a royal growth of beard—this was all Bulstrode had time to remark. He rose.

"My servant says you want to see me. Come near the fire, won't you?"

The visitor did not stir. Bewildered in the warmth of the room, he stood far back on the edge of the thick rug. To all appearances he was a bit of driftwood from the streets, one of the usual vagrant class who haunt the saloons and park and steer from lockup to night-lodging, until they finally steer themselves entirely off the face of history, and the potter's field gathers them in. Nothing but his entrance into this conventional room before this well-balanced member of decent society was peculiar.

As he still neither moved nor spoke, Bulstrode, approaching him, again invited: "Come near the fire, won't you? and when you are warm tell me what I can do for you."

"It's the storm," murmured the man, and a half-human look came across his face with his words. "I mean to say, it's this hellish storm that's got in my throat and lungs. I can't speak—it's so warm here. It will be better in a second. No, not near the fire; thanks—chilblains." He looked down at his poor feet.

The voice which the storm had beaten and thrashed to painful hoarseness was entirely out of keeping with the man's appearance, and in intonation, accent, and language was a shock to the hearer.

"Don't stand back like that—come into the room." Bulstrode wheeled a chair briskly about. "There; sit down and drink this; it's a mild blend."

"I'm very wet," said the man. "I'll drip on the rug."

"Hang the rug!"

The tramp drained the glass given him at one swallow merely; it appeared to clear his throat and release his speech. He gathered his rags together.

"I beg pardon for forcing myself on you like this, but I fancy I needn't tell you I'm desperate—desperate!" He held out his hand; it shook like a pale ghost's. "I look it, I'm sure. I haven't eaten a meal or slept in a bed for a fortnight. I've begged work and charity. All day I've been shovelling snow, but I'm too weak to work now."

He was being led to a chair. He sank in it. "Before they sent me to the Island I decided to try a ruse. I went into a saloon and opened a directory, and I said, 'The first name I put my finger upon I'll take as good luck, and I'll go and see the person, man or woman. I opened to James Thatcher Bulstrode, 9 Washington Square." He half smiled; the pale, trembling hand was waving like a pitiful flag, a signal of distress to catch the sight of some bark that might lend aid. "So I came here. When there seemed actually to be some chance of my getting in, why, my courage failed me. I don't expect you to believe my story or to believe anything, except that I am desperate—desperate. It's below zero to-night out there—infernally cold." He took the pin out of the collar turned up around his neck and let his coat fall back. Under it Bulstrode saw he wore a thin flannel shirt. The tramp repeated to himself, as it were, "It's a bad storm."

He looked up in a dazed fashion at his host as if for acceptance of his remark. In the easy chair, half swathed in rags, pitiful in thinness, dripping from shoes and clothes water that the storm had drenched into him, he was a sorry object in the atmosphere of the well-ordered conventional room. The heat and whiskey, the famine and exposure, cast a film across his eyes and brain. He indistinctly saw his host pass into the next room and shut the door behind him.

"By Jove!" he murmured under his breath in wonder find dumb thanks for the shelter. "By Jove!" The stimulant filtered agreeably through him; more charitable than any element with which he had been lately familiar, the fire's heat began to thaw the ice in his bones. He laid his dripping hat on his knees, his thin hands folded themselves over it, his eyes closed. For hours he had shuffled about the streets to keep from freezing. At the charity organization they gave work he was too weak to do; he had not eaten a substantial meal in so long that he had forgotten the taste of food and had ceased to crave it. In the soft light of lamp and fire he fell into a doze. Bulstrode, if he had stolen softly in to look at his visitor, would have seen a man not over thirty years of age, although want and dissipation added ten to his appearance. He would have been quick to take note of the fine, delicately cut face under the disfiguring beard, and of the slender, emaciated body deformed by its rags.

Possibly he did so noiselessly come in and stand by the unconscious creature, but the sleeping vagabond, dreaming fitful, half-painful things, was ignorant of the visitor. Finally across his mind's sharp despair came a sense of warmth and comfort, and in its spell he awoke.

A servant, not the one who had thrust him into the drawing-room, but another with a friendly face, stood at his side, and in broken English asked the guest of Bulstrode to follow him; and gathering his scattered senses together and picking up his rags and what was left of himself, the creature obeyed a summons which he supposed was to hale him again into the winter streets.

It was some three hours later that Bulstrode in his dining-room entertained his singular guest.

"I have asked you to dine with me," he explained, with a certain graciousness, as if he claimed, not gave, a favor, "as I'm all alone to-night. It's Christmas eve, you know—or perhaps you've been more or less glad to forget it?"

The young man who took the chair indicated him was unrecognizable as the stranger who had staggered into 9 Washington Square three or four hours before. Turned out in spotless linen and a good suit that fitted him fairly well, shaven face save for a mustache above his lip, bathed, brushed, refreshed by nourishment and sleep and repose, he looked like one who has been in the waters, possibly a long, long time; like one who has drifted, been bruised, shattered, and beaten, but who has nevertheless drifted to shore; and in spite of his borrowed clothes, his scarred, haggard face, he looked like a gentleman, and Bulstrode from the moment he spoke had recognized him as one.

The food was a feast to the stranger, in spite of nourishment already given him by Prosper. He restrained the ferocious hunger that woke at sight and smell of the good things, forced himself not to cry out with eagerness, not to tear and grasp the eatables off the plate, not to devour like a beast. Every time he raised his eyes he met those of the butler Ruggles, and as quickly the stranger looked away. The face of the servant standing by the sideboard, back of him the white and gleaming array of the Bulstrode family silver like piles of snow, was for some reason or other not a pleasant face; the stranger did not think it so.

Once again seated in the room he had entered in his outcast state, a cup of coffee at his hand, a cigar between his lips, the agreeable atmosphere of the old room and its charming objects, the kindly look on the face of his host, all swam before him. Looking frankly at Bulstrode, he said, not without grace of manner:

"I give it up. I can't—it's not to be made out or understood..."

"Do you," interrupted the other, "feel equal to talking a little: to telling me how it happens that you are wandering, as you seem to be? For from the moment you first spoke——"

The young man nodded. "I'm a gentleman. It's worse somehow—I don't know why, but it is."

Bulstrode thought out for him: "It's like remembering agreeable places to which you feel you will never return. Only," he quickly offered, "in your case you must, you know, go back."

"No," said the young man, quietly.

There was so much entire renunciation in what he said that the other could not press it.

"Better still, you can then go on?"

The vagrant looked at his companion as if to say: "Since I've known you—seen you—I have thought that I might." But he said nothing more, and Bulstrode, reading a diffidence which did not displease him, finished:

"You shall go on, and I'll help you."

The stranger bowed his head, and the wine sent the color up until his cheeks took the flush of health. Remaining a little bent over, his eyes on his feet clad in Bulstrode's shoes, he said:

"I'm an Englishman. My family is everything that's decent and all that, you know, and proud. We've first-rate traditions. I'm a younger son, and I've always been a thorn in the family's side. I've been a sort of vagabond from the first, but never as bad as they thought or believed."

He paused. His recital was painful to him. Bulstrode waited, then knocking off the ash from his cigar, urged:

"Tell me about it, tell me frankly; it will, you see, be a relief. We can do better that way—if I know."

The stranger looked up at him quickly, then leaning forward in his chair, talked as it were to the carpet, and rapidly:

"It's just a year ago. I'd been going it rather hard and got into trouble more or less—lost at cards and the races, and been running up a lot of bills. My father was awfully down on me. I'd gone home for the holidays and had a talk with my father and asked him to pay up for me just this once more. He refused, and we got very angry, both of us, and separated in a rage. The house was full of people—a Christmas ball and a tree. My father had, so it happened, quite a lot of money in the house. I knew where it was—I had seen him count it and put it away. That night for some reason the whole thing sickened me, in the mess I was in, and I left and went up to London without even saying good-by. In the course of the week my brother came and found me drunk in my rooms. It seems that the money had been taken from my father's safe, and they accused me."

"But," interrupted Bulstrode, eagerly, "it was a simple thing to exculpate yourself."

Ignoring his remark, the other continued: "I have never seen my father since that night."

No amount of former deception can persuade a man that he is a lame judge of character. The young Englishman's emaciated face, where eyes spoiled by dissipation looked out at his companion, was to this impulsive reader of humanity a good face. Bulstrode, however, saw what he wanted to see in most people. Given a chance to study them, or rather further to know them intimately, he might indeed have ended by finding in some cases a few of the imagined qualities. Here misery was evident, degradation as well, timidity, and hesitation,—but honesty? Bulstrode fancied that its characters were not effaced, and he helped the recital:

"Since you so left your people?"

"The steady go down!" acknowledged the other. "I worked my passage to the States on a liner—I stoked..."

"Any chap," encouraged the gentleman, "who can do that can pull himself, I should say, out of a worse hole."

"There's scarcely a bad habit I haven't had down in the hole with me," confessed the other, "and they've held me there."

They both remained for a few seconds without speaking, and the host's eyes wandered to where, over his mantel-shelf, in a great gold frame was the portrait of a lady done by Baker. A quaint young lady in her early teens, with bare arms and frilled frock. She had Bulstrode's eyes. By her side was the black muzzle of a great hound, on whose head the little hand rested. Under the picture, from a silver bowl of roses, came a fragrance that filled the room, and, close by stood a photograph of another lady, very modern, very mocking, and very lovely.

Bulstrode, delicately drawing inferences from the influences in his life, and, if not consciously grateful, reflecting them charmingly, broke the silence:

"You must have formed some plan or other in your mind when you came to my door? What, in the event of your being received, did you intend to ask me to do?"

The stranger lifted his head and his response was irrelevant: "It seems a hundred years since I stood there in that storm and your man pulled me in. I haven't seen a place like this for long, not the inside of decent houses. When I left the ship I managed to get down with a chap as far as Florida, where he had an orange-plantation, but the venture fell through. I fancy the rest is as well forgotten. When I came in here to-night I intended to ask you for a Christmas gift of money, and I should have gone out and drunk myself to hell."

"You spoke"—Bulstrode fetched him back—"of your father and your brother; was there no one else?"

The younger man looked up without reply.

"There has been, then, no more kindly influence in your life—no sister—no woman?"

Bulstrode brought out the words; in his judgment they meant so very much. He saw a change cross the other's face.

"I fancy there are not many men who haven't had a woman in their lives for good or bad," he said, with a short laugh.

"Well," urged the gentleman, gently, "and for what was this woman?"

As if he repelled the insistence, the young fellow stammered:

"I say, this putting a fellow on the rack——"

But Bulstrode leaned forward in his chair and rested his hand on his companion's knee and pleaded:

"Speak out frankly—frankly—I believe I shall understand; it will free your heart to speak. This influence which to a man should be the best—the best—what was it to you?" Bulstrode sat back and waited, and the other man seemed quite lost in melancholy meditations for some few seconds. Then Bulstrode put it: "For a young man, no matter how wild, to leave his home under the misapprehension you claim:—for him to make no effort to reinstate himself: with no attempt at justice: for him to become a wanderer—there must be an extraordinary reason, almost an improbable one——"

"I don't ask you to hear," said the vagrant, quickly.

"I wish to do so. It would have been a simple matter to exculpate yourself—you had not the funds in your possession, had never had them. You took no means to clear yourself?"

"None."

Bulstrode looked hard at the face his care had revealed to him: the deep eyes, the neck, chin, the sensitive mouth—there was a certain distinction about him in his borrowed clothes.

"Where is the woman now?"

"She married my brother—she is Lady Waring—my name," tardily introduced the stranger, "is Cecil Waring."

Bulstrode bowed. "Tell me something of her, in a word—in a word."

"Well, she is always clever," said the young man, slowly, "always very beautiful, and then very poor."

"Yes," nodded Bulstrode.

"She is like the rest of us—one of a fast wild set—a——"

"A gambler?" Bulstrode helped the description.

"She played," acknowledged the young man, "as the rest do—bridge."

"Were you engaged to her, Waring?"

"Yes," he slowly acknowledged, as if each word hurt him.

"And did she believe you guilty?"

"I think," said the other, with an inscrutable expression, "she could not have done so."

"But she let you go under suspicion?"

"Yes."

"Without a word of good faith, of comfort?"

"Yes."

"Did she know of your embarrassments?"

"Too well."

"You tell me she was poor and—possibly she had embarrassments of her own?"

"Possibly."

Bulstrode came over to him.

"Was she at the Christmas ball that night?"

The young man rose as well, his eyes on his questioner's; the color had all left his face—he appeared fascinated—then he shook himself and unexpectedly laughed.

"No," he said; "oh no."

The older man bowed his head and replied, quite inaptly:

"I understand!"

He took a turn across the room.

The few steps brought him in front of the mantel and the photograph of the modern lady in her furs and close hat. He stood and met the fire of her mocking eyes.

"And you believe him, Jimmy!" he could hear her say in her delicious voice.

"Yes," he mentally told her, "I believe him."

"You think that to save a woman's name and honor he has become an outcast on the face of the earth ... Jimmy!"

He still gently replied to her:

"Men who love, you know, have but one code—the woman and honor."

Still mocking, but gentle as would have been the touch of the roses in the bowl near the photograph, her voice told him,

"Then he's worth saving, Jimmy."

Worth saving ... he agreed, and turned to his guest. In doing so he saw that Ruggles had come into the drawing-room to remove the coffee-tray.

"Beg pardon, sir, but you mentioned there would be a letter to send shortly?"

"By Jove! so I did!" exclaimed Bulstrode. "I beg your pardon; will you excuse me while I write a line at the desk?" The line was an order to the florist.

For some reason the eyes of the Englishman had not quitted the butler's face, and Ruggles, with cold insolence, had stared at him in turn. Waring, albeit in another man's clothes, fed and seated before a friendly hearth, and once again within the pale of his own class, had regained something of his natural air and feeling of superiority. He resented the servant's insolence, and his face was angrily flushed as Bulstrode gave his orders, and the man left the room.

"I must go away," he said, rather brusquely. "I can never thank you for what you have done. I feel as if I had been in a dream."

"Sit down." His companion ignored his words. "Sit down."

"It's late."

"For what, my friend?"

"I must find some place to sleep."

"You have found it," gently smiled Bulstrode. "Your room is prepared for you here." Then he interrupted: "No thanks—no thanks. If what you tell me is all I think it is, I'm proud to share my roof with you, Waring."

"Don't think well of me—don't!" blurted out the other. "You don't know what a ruined vagabond I am. When you send me out to-morrow I shall begin again; but let me tell you that although I've herded with tramps and thieves, been in the hospital and lock-up, and worked in the hell of a furnace in a ship's hold, nothing hurt me any more, not after I left England—not after those days when I waited in Liverpool for a word—for a sign—not after that, all you see the marks of now—nothing hurts now but the memory. I'm immune."

"You will feel differently—you will humanize."

"Never!" exclaimed the tramp.

"To-night," said Bulstrode, simply.

Waring looked at him curiously.

"What a wonderful man!" he half murmured. "I was led to you by fate: you have forced me to lay my soul bare to you—and now..."

"Let's look things in the face together," suggested the gentleman, practically. "I have a ranch out West. A good piece of property. It's in the hands of a clever Englishman and promises well. How would you like to go out there and start anew? He'll give you a welcome, and he's a first-rate business man. Will you go?"

Waring had with his old habit thrust his hands in his pockets. He stood well on his feet. Bulstrode remarked it. He looked meditatively down between the soles of his shoes.

"You mean to say you give me a chance—to—to——"

"Begin anew, Waring."

"I drink a great deal," said the young man.

"You will swear off."

"I've gambled away all the money I ever had."

"You will be taking care of mine, and it will be a point of honor."

"I'm under a cloud——

"Not in my eyes," said Bulstrode, stoutly.

"—which I can never clear."

Bulstrode made a dismissing gesture.

"I should want the chap out there to know the truth."

"The truth," caught his hearer, and the other as quickly interrupted:

"To know under what circumstances I left my people."

"No, that is unnecessary," said Bulstrode, firmly. "Nobody has any right to your past. I don't know his. That's the beauty of the plains—the freshness of them. It's a new start—a clean page."

Still the guest hesitated.

"I don't believe it's worth while. You see, I've batted about now so much alone, with nobody near me but the lowest sort; I've given in so long, with no care to do better, that I haven't any confidence in myself. I don't want you to see me fail, sir,—I don't want to go back on you."

Bulstrode had heard very understandingly part of the man's word, part of his excuse for his weakness.

"That's it," he said, musingly. "Butting about alone. It's that—loneliness—that's responsible for so many things."

Looking up brightly as his friend whose derelict dangerous vessel, so near to port and repair, was heading for the wide seas again, Bulstrode wondered: "If such a thing could be that some friend, not too uncongenial, could be found to go with you and stand as it were by you—some friend who knew—who comprehended——"

Waring laughed. "I haven't such a one."

"Yes," said the older gentleman, "you have, and he will stand by you. I'll go West with you myself to-morrow—on Christmas day. I need a change. I want to get away for a little time."

Waring drew back a step, for Bulstrode had risen. Cold Anglo-Saxon as he was, the unprecedented miracle this gentleman presented made him seem almost lunatic. He stared blankly.

"It's simpler than it looks." Bulstrode attempted conventionally to shear it of a little of its eccentricity. "There's every reason why I should look after my property out there. I've never seen it at all."

"I'm not worth such a goodness," Waring faltered, earnestly,—"not worth it."

"You will be."

"Don't hope it."

"I believe it," smiled the gentleman; "and at all events I'll stand by you till you are—if you'll say the word."

Waring, whose lips were trembling, repeated vaguely, "The word?"

"Well," replied Bulstrode, "you might say those—they're as good any—will you stand by me——?"

Making the first hearty spontaneous gesture he had shown, the young man seized the other's outstretched hand. "Yes," he breathed; "by Heaven! I will!"

It was past midnight when Bulstrode, pushing open the curtains of his bedroom, looked out on the frozen world of Washington Square, where of tree and arch not an outline was visible under the disguising snow; and above, in the sky swept clear of clouds by the strongest of winds, rode the round full disk of the Christmas moon.

The adoption of a vagrant, the quixotic decision he had taken to leave New York on Christmas day, the plain facts of the outrageous folly his impulsiveness led him to contemplate, had relegated his more worldly plans to the background. Laying aside his waistcoat, he took out the letter in whose contents he had been absorbed when Cecil Waring crossed the threshold of his drawing-room.

Well ... as he re-read at leisure her delightful plan for Christmas day, he sighed that he could not do for them both better than to go two thousand miles away! "Waring thinks himself a vagrant—and so, poor chap, he has been; but there are vagrants of another kind." Jimmy reflected he felt himself to be one of these others, and was led to speculate if there were many outcasts like himself, and what ultimately, if their courage was sufficient to keep them banished to the end, would be the reward?

"Since," he reflected, "there's only one thing I desire—and it's the one thing forbidden—I fail sometimes to quite puzzle it out!"

He had finished his preparations for the night and was about to turn out the light, when, with his hand on the electric button, he paused, for he distinctly heard from downstairs what sounded like a call—a cry.

Taking his revolver from the top drawer, he went into the hall, to feel a draft of icy air blow up the staircase, to see over the balusters the open door of the dining-room and light within it, and to hear more clearly the sounds that had come to him through closed doors declare themselves to be scuffling—struggling—the half-cry of a muffled voice—a fall, then Bulstrode started.

"I'm coming," he declared, and ran down the stairs like a boy.

On the dining-room floor, close to the window wide open to the icy night, lay a man's form, and over him bent another man cruelly, with all the animus of a bird of prey.

The under man was Ruggles, Bulstrode's butler, his eyes starting from their sockets, his mouth open, his color livid; he couldn't have called out, for the other man had seized his necktie, twisted it tight as a tourniquet around the man's gullet, and so kneeling with one knee on his chest, Waring held the big man under.

"I say," panted the young man, "can you lend a hand, sir? I've got him, but I'm not strong enough to keep him."

Bulstrode thought his servant's eyes rolled appealingly at him. He cocked his revolver, holding it quietly, and asked coolly:

"What's the matter with him that he needs to be kept?"

"Would you sit on his chest, Mr. Bulstrode?"

"No," said that gentleman. "I'll cover him so. What's the truth?"

"I heard a queer noise," panted the Englishman, "and came out to see what it was, and this fellow was just getting through the window. There was another chap outside, but he got away. I caught this one from the back, otherwise I could never have thrown him."

"You're throttling him."

"He deserves it."

"Let him up."

"Mr. Bulstrode...!"

"Yes," said that gentleman, decidedly, "let him up."

But Ruggles, released from the hand whose knuckles had ground themselves into his windpipe, could not at once rise. The breath was out of him, for he had been heavily struck in the stomach by a blow from the fist of a man whose training in sport had delightfully returned at need.

Ruggles began to breathe like a porpoise, to grunt and pant and roll over. He staggered to his feet, and with a string of imprecations raised his fist at Waring, but as Bulstrode's revolver was entirely ready to answer at command, he did not venture to leave the spot where he stood.

"Now," said his master, "when you get your tongue your story will be just the same as Mr. Waring's. You found him getting away with the silver. The probabilities are all with you, Ruggles. The police will be here in just about five minutes. Ten to one the guilty man is known to the officers. Now there's an overcoat and hat on the hat-rack in the hall. I give both of you time to get away. There's the front door and the window—which, by the way, you would better shut, Waring, as it's a cold morning."

Neither man moved. Without removing his eyes from the butler or uncovering him, Bulstrode, by means of the messenger-call to the right of the window, summoned the police. The metallic click of the button sounded loud in the room.

Ruggles shook his great hand high in air.

"I'd—I'd——"

"Never mind that," interrupted the householder. "The man who's going had better take his chance. There's one minute lost."

During the next half-second the modern philanthropist breathed in suspense. It was so on the cards that he might be obliged to apologize to his antipathetic butler and find himself sentimentally sold by Waring!

But Ruggles it was who with a parting oath stepped to the door—accelerating his pace as the daze began to pass a little from his brain, and snatched the hat and coat, unlocked the front door, opened it, looked quickly up and down the white streets, and then without a word cut down the steps and across Washington Square, slowly at first, and then on a run.

Bulstrode turned to his visitor.

"Come," he said, "let's go up to bed."

"But," stammered the young man, "you're never going to let him go like that?"

"Yes, I am," confessed the unpractical gentleman. "I couldn't send a man to jail on Christmas day."

"But the police——?"

"I shall tell them out of my window that it was a false alarm."

Bulstrode shut and locked his door, and turning to Waring, laughed delightedly.

"I must tell you that when he let you in last night Ruggles did not think you were a gentleman. He must have found out this morning that you were very much of a man. It's astonishing where you got your strength, though. He'd make two of you, and you're not fit in any way."

He looked ghastly enough as Bulstrode spoke, and the gentleman put his arm under the Englishman's. "I'll ring for the servants and have some coffee made and fetched to your room. Lean on me." He helped the vagabond upstairs.

The New Yorker, whose sentimental follies were certainly a menace to public safety and a premium to begging and vagabondage and crime, slept well and late, and was awakened finally by the keen, bright ringing of the telephone at his side. As he took up the receiver his whole face illumined.

"Merry Christmas, Jimmy!"

.......

"What wonderful roses! Thanks a thousand times!"

.......

"But of course I knew! No other man in New York is sentimental enough to have a woman awakened at eight o'clock by a bunch of flowers!"

.......

"Forgive you!" (It was clear that she did.)

.......

"Jimmy, what a day for Tuxedo, and what a shame I can't go!"

.......

"You weren't going! You mean to say that you had refused?"

.......

"I don't understand—it's the connection—West?"

"Why, ranches look after themselves. They always do. They go right on. You don't mean it, on Christmas day!"

.......

"I shouldn't care for your reasons. They're sure to be ridiculous—unpractical—unnecessary—don't tell them to me."

There was a pause, and then the voice, which had undergone a slight change said:

"Jack's ill again ... that's why I couldn't go to Tuxedo. I shall pass the day here in town. I called up to tell you this—and to suggest—but since you're going West..."

Falconer's illnesses! How well Bulstrode knew them, and how well he could see her alone in the familiar little drawing-room by a hearth not built for a Christmas tree! He had promised Waring, "I'll stand by you." It was a kind of vow—a real vow, and the poor tramp had lived up to his.

"Jimmy." There was a note he had never heard before; if a tone can be a tear, it was one.

He interrupted her.

.......

"How dear of you!"

.......

"But I haven't any Christmas tree!"

.......

"You'll fetch one? How dear of you! We'll trim it—with your roses—make it bloom. Come early and help me dress the tree."

Two hours later he opened the door into his breakfast-room with the guiltiness of a truant boy. He wore culprit shame written all over his face, and the young man who stood waiting for him in the window might almost have read his friend's dejection in his embarrassed face.

But Waring came eagerly forward, answered the season's greetings, and said quickly:

"Are you still in the same mind about the West, Mr. Bulstrode?"

(Poor Bulstrode!)

"I mean to say, sir, if you still feel like giving me this chance, I've a favor to ask. Would you let me go alone?"

Bulstrode gasped.

"Since last night a lot has happened to me, not only since you've befriended me, but since I tussled with that fellow here. I'd like a chance to see what I can do alone. If you, as you so generously plan, go with me, I shall feel watched—protected. It will weaken me more than anything else. I suppose I shall go all to pieces, but I'd like to try my strength. If I could suddenly master that chap with my fists after months of dissipation——"

Bulstrode finished for him:

"You can master the rest."

"Don't give me any extra money," pleaded the tramp, as if he foresaw his friend's impulse. "Pay my ticket out West, if you will, and write to the man who is there, and I'll start in."

Bulstrode beamed on him.

"You're a man," he assured him—"a man."

"I may become one."

"You're a fine fellow."

"You'll trust me, then?"

"Implicitly."

"Then let me start to-day. I'm reckless—let me get away. I may get off at the first station and pawn my clothes and drink and drink to a lower hell than before—but let me try alone."

"You shall go alone—and go to-day."

Prosper came in with the coffee; he, too, was beaming, and the servants below-stairs were all agog. Waring was a hero.

"Prosper," said his master, in French, "will you, after you have served breakfast, go out to the market quarters and see if you can discover for me a medium-sized, very well-proportioned little Christmas tree? Fetch it home with you."

Waring smiled faintly.

Bulstrode smiled too, and more comprehendingly, and Prosper smiled and said:

"Mais certainement, monsieur."

THE SECOND ADVENTURE

II

IN WHICH HE TRIES TO BUY A PORTRAIT

Bulstrode was extremely fond of travel, and every now and then treated himself to a season in London or Paris, and in the May following his adventure with Waring he saw, from his apartments in the Hôtel Ritz, from Boulevard, Bois, and the Champs Elysées, as much of the maddeningly delicious Parisian springtime "as was good for him at his age," so he said! It gave the feeling that he was a mere boy, and with buoyant sensations astir in him, life had begun over again.

Any morning between eleven and twelve Bulstrode might have been seen in the Bois de Boulogne briskly walking along the Avenue des Acacias, his well-filled chest thrown out, his step light and assured; cane in hand, a boutonnière tinging the lapel of his coat; immaculate and fresh as a rose, he exhaled good-humor, kindliness, and well-being.

From their traps and motors charming women bowed and smiled, the fine fleur and the beau monde greeted him cordially.

"Regardez moi ce bon Bulstrode qui se promene," if it were a Frenchman, or, "There's dear old Jimmy Bulstrode!" if he were recognized by a compatriot.

Bulstrode was rather slight of build, yet with an evident strength of body that indicated a familiarity with exercise, a healthful habit of sport and activity. His eyes, clear-sighted and strong, looked through the medium of no glass happily and naïvely on the world. Many years before his hair had begun to turn gray, and had not nearly finished the process; it grew thickly, and was quite dark about his ears and on his brow. Having gained experience and kept his youth, he was as rare and delightful as fine wine—as inspiring as spring. It was his heart (Mrs. Falconer said) that made him so, his good, gentle, generous heart!—and she should know. His fastidiousness in point of dress, and his good taste kept him close to elegance of attire.

"You turn yourself out, Jimmy, on every occasion," she had said, "as if you were on the point of meeting the woman you loved." And Bulstrode had replied that such consistent hopefulness should certainly be ultimately rewarded.

He gave the impression of a man who in his youth starts out to take a long and pleasant journey and finds the route easy, the taverns agreeable, and the scenes all the guide-book promised. Midway—(he had turned the page of forty)—midway, pausing to look back, Bulstrode saw the experiences of his travels in their sunny valleys, full of goodly memories, and the future, to his sweet hopefulness, promised to be a pleasant journey to the end.

During the time that he spent in Paris every pet charity in the American colony took advantage of the philanthropic Mr. Bulstrode's passing through the city, and came to him to be set upon its feet, and every pretty woman with an interest, hobby, or scheme came as well to this generous millionaire, told him about her fad and went away with a donation.

One ravishing May morning Bulstrode, taking his usual constitutional in the Bois, paused at the end of the Avenue des Acacias to find it deserted and attractively quiet; he sat down on a little bench the more reposefully to enjoy the day and time.

There are, fortunately, certain things which, unlike money, can be shared only with certain people; and Bulstrode felt that the pleasure of this spring day, the charm of the opposite wood-glades into which he meditatively looked, the tranquil as well as the buoyant joy of life, were among those personal things so delightful when shared—and which, if too long enjoyed alone, bring (let it be scarcely whispered on this bewildering May morning) something like sadness!

Before his happier mood changed his attention was attracted by a woman who came rapidly toward the avenue from a little alley at the side. He looked up quickly at the feminine creature who so aptly appeared upon his musings. She was young; her form in its simple dress assured him this. He could not see her face, for it was covered by her hands. Abruptly taking the opposite direction, she went over to a farther seat, where she sat down, and when the young girl put her arms on the back of the seat, her head upon her arms, and in the remoteness this part of the avenue offered, cried without restraint, the kind-hearted Bulstrode felt that it was too cruel to be true.

But soft-hearted though he was, the gentleman was a worldling as well, and that the outburst was a ruse more than suggested itself to him as he went over to the lovely Niobe whose abundant fair hair sunned from under her simple straw hat and from beneath whose frayed skirt showed a worn little shoe.

He spoke in French.

"Pardon, madame, but you seem in great distress."

The poor thing started violently, and as soon as she displayed her pretty tearful face the American recognized in her a compatriot. She waved him emphatically away.

"Oh, please don't notice me—don't speak to me—I didn't see that anybody was there."

"I am an American, too: can't I do anything for you—won't you let me?"

And he saw at once that she wanted to be left alone. She averted her head determinedly.

"No, no, please don't notice me. Please go away!"

He had nothing to do but to obey her, and as he reluctantly did so a smart pony-cart driven by a lady alone came briskly along and drew up, for the occupant had recognized him.

"Get in!" she rather commanded. "My dear Jimmy, how nice to find you here, and how nice to drive you at least as far as the entrance!"

As the rebuffed philanthropist accepted he cast a ruthful glance at the solitary figure on the bench.

"Do you see that poor girl over there? She's an American, and in real trouble."

"My dear Jimmy!" His companion's tone left him in no doubt as to her scepticism.

"Oh, I know, I know," he interrupted, "but she's not a fraud. She's the real thing."

They were already gayly whirling away from the sad little figure.

"Did you make her cry?"

"I? Certainly not."

"Then let the man who did wipe her tears away!"

But Bulstrode had seen the face of the girl, and he was haunted by it all day until the Bois and its bright atmosphere became only the setting for an unhappy woman, young and lovely, whom it had been impossible for him to help.

Somebody had said that Bulstrode should have his portrait done with his hands in his pockets, and Mrs. Falconer had replied, "Or rather with other people's hands in his pockets!"

The next afternoon he found himself part of a group of people who, out of charity and curiosity, patronized the Western Artists' Exhibition in the Rue Monsieur.

Having made a ridiculously generous donation to the support of this league at the request of a certain lovely lady, Bulstrode followed his generosity by a personal effort, and with not much opposition on his part permitted himself to be taken to the exhibition.

He was not, in the ultra sense of the word, a connaisseur, but he thought he knew a horror when he saw it! So he said, and on this afternoon his eyes ached and his offended taste cried out before he had patiently travelled half-way down the line of canvases.

"My dear lady," he confided sotto voce to his friend, "I feel more inclined to establish a fund for sending all these young women back to the prairies, if that's where they come from, than to aid in this slaughter of public time and taste. Why don't they stay at home—and marry?"

"That's a vulgar and limited point of view to take," his friend reproached him. "Don't you acknowledge that a woman has many careers instead of one? You seem to be thoroughly enjoying your liberty! What if I should ask you why you don't stay at home, and marry?"

Bulstrode looked at his guide comprehensively and smiled gently. His response was irrelevant. "Look at this picture! It's too dreadful for words."

"Hush, you're not a judge. Here and there there is evidence of great talent."

They had drawn up before a portrait, and poor Bulstrode caught his breath with a groan:

"It's too awful! It's crime to encourage it."

Mrs. Falconer tried to lead him on.

"Well, this is an unfortunate place to stop," she confessed. "That portrait represents more tragedy than you can see."

"It couldn't," murmured Bulstrode.

"The poor girl who did it has struggled on here for two years, living sometimes on a franc a day. Just fancy! She has been trying to get orders so that she can stay on and study. Poor thing! The people who are interested say that she's been near to desperation. She is awfully proud, and won't take any assistance but orders. You can imagine they're not besieging her! She has come to her last cent, I believe, and has to go home to Idaho."

"Let her go, my dear friend." Bulstrode was earnest. "It's the best thing she could possibly do!"

His companion put her hand on his arm.

"Please be quiet," she implored. "There she is, standing over by the door. That rather pretty girl with the disorderly blonde hair."

Bulstrode looked up—saw her—looked again, and exclaimed:

"Is that the girl? Do you know her? Present me, will you?"

"Nonsense." She detained him. "How you go from hot to cold! Why should you want to meet her, pray?"

"Oh," he evaded, "it's a curious study. I want to talk to her about art, and if you don't present me I shall speak to her without an introduction."

Not many moments later Bulstrode was cornered in a dingy little room, where tea that tasted like the infusion of a haystack was being served. He had skilfully disassociated Miss Laura Desprey from her Bohemian companions and placed her on a little divan, before which, with a teacup in his hand, he stood.

She wore the same dress, the same hat—and he did not doubt the same shoes which characterized her miserable toilet when he had surprised her childlike display of grief on a bench in the Bois. He had done quite right in speaking to her, and he thanked his stars that she did not in the least remember him.

He thought with kind humor: "No wonder she cries if she paints like that!"

But it was not in a spirit of criticism that he bent his friendly eyes on the Bohemian. He had the pleasure of seeing her plainly this time, for the window back of her admitted a generous square of light against which her blonde head framed itself, and her untidy hair was like a dusty mesh of gold. She regarded the amiable gentleman out of eyes child-like and purely blue. Under her round chin the edges of a black bow tied loosely stood out like the wings of a butterfly. Her dress was careless and poor, but she was grace in it and youth—"and what," thought Bulstrode, "has one a right to expect more of any woman?" He remembered her boots and shuddered. He remembered the one franc a day and began his campaign.

"I want so much to meet the painter of that portrait over there," he began.

Her face lightened.

"Oh, did you like it?"

"I think it's wonderful, perfectly wonderful!"

A slow red crept up the thin contour of her cheek. She leaned forward!

"Do you really mean that?"

He said most seriously:

"Yes, I can frankly say I haven't seen a portrait in a long time which impressed me so much."

His praise was not in Latin Quarter vernacular, and coming from a Philistine, had only a certain value to the artist. But to a lonely stranded girl the words were balm. Bulstrode, in his immaculate dress, his conventional manner, was as foreign a person to the Bohemian student as if he had been an inhabitant of another planet. Her speech was brusque and quick, with a generous burr in her "rs" when she replied.

"I've studied at Julian's two years now. This was my Salon picture, but it didn't get in."

"If one can judge by those that did"—Bulstrode's tact was delightful—"you should feel honorably refused. I suppose you are at work on another portrait?"

The face which his interest had brightened clouded.

"No, I'm going home—to Idaho—I'm not painting any more."

All the tragedy to a whole-souled Latin Quarter art student that this implied was not revealed to Bulstrode, but, as it was, his sensitive kindness felt so much already that it ached. He hastened toward his goal with eagerness:

"I'm so awfully sorry! Because, do you know, I was going to ask you if you couldn't possibly paint my portrait?" It came from him on the spur of the moment. His frank eyes met hers and might have quailed at his hypocrisy, but the expression of joy on her face, eclipsing everything else, dazzled him.

She cried out impulsively:

"Oh—goodness!" so loud that one or two tea-drinkers turned about. After a second, having gained control and half as though she expected some motive she did not understand:

"But you never heard of me before to-day! I don't believe you really liked that portrait over there so very much."

With a candor that impressed her he assured her: "I give you my word of honor I've never felt quite so about any portrait before."

Here Miss Desprey had a cup of tea handed her by a vague-eyed girl who stumbled over Bulstrode in her ministrations, much to her confusion.

Laura Desprey drank her tea with avidity, put the cup down on the table near, and leaning over to her patron, exclaimed:

"I just can't believe I've got an order!"

Bulstrode affirmed smiling: "You have, and if you could arrange to stay over for it—if it would," he delicately put, "be worth your while——"

She said quietly:

"Yes, it would be worth my while."

A distrait look passed over her face for a second, and Bulstrode saw he was forgotten in, as he supposed, a painter's vision of an order and its contingent technicalities.

"I can begin at once." He lost no time. "I'm quite free."

"But—I have no studio."

"There must be studios to rent."

Yes. She knew of one; she could secure it for a month. It would take that time—she was a slow worker.

"But we haven't discussed the price." Before so much poverty and struggle—not that it was new to him, but clothed like this in beauty it was rare and appealed to him—he was embarrassed by his riches. "Now the price. I want," he meditated, "a full-length portrait, with a great deal of background, just as handsome and expensive looking as you can paint it."

He exquisitely sacrificed himself and winced at his own words, and saw her color with amusement and a little scorn, but he went on bravely:

"Now for a man like me, Miss Desprey—I am sure you will know what I mean—a man who has never been painted before—this picture will have to cost me a lot of money. You see otherwise my friends would not appreciate it."

In the vulgarian he was making himself out to be his friends would not have recognized the unpretentious Bulstrode.

"Get the place, Miss Desprey, and let me come as soon as you can. All this change of plans will give you extra expenses—I understand about that! Every time I change my rooms it costs me a fortune. Now if you will let me send you over a check for half payment on the picture, for, let us say"—he made it as large as he dared and a quarter of what he wanted. They were alone in the tea-room, the motley gathering had weeded itself out. Miss Desprey turned pale.

"No," she gasped; "I couldn't take anything like half so much for the whole thing."

Bulstrode said coldly:

"I'm afraid I must insist, Miss Desprey; I couldn't order less than a fifteen-hundred dollar portrait. It's the sum I have planned to pay when I'm painted."

"But a celebrated painter would paint it for that."

Bulstrode smiled fatuously.

"Can't a man pay for his fads? I want to be painted by the person who did that portrait over there, Miss Desprey."

In a tiny studio—the dingy chrysalis of a Bohemian art student—Bulstrode posed for his portrait.

Each morning saw him set forth from the Ritz alert and debonaire in his fastidious toilet—-saw him cross the Place Vendôme, the bridge, and lose his worldly figure in the lax nonchalant crowd of the Quarter Latin. At the end of an alley as narrow and picturesque as a lane in a colored print he knocked at a green door, and was admitted to the studio by his protégée. In another second he had assumed his prescribed position according to the pose, and Miss Desprey before her easel began the séance.

On these May days the glass roof admitted delightful gradations of glory to the commonplace atelier. A few cheap casts, a few yards of mustard-toned burlaps, some Botticelli and Manet photographs, a mangy divan, and a couple of chairs were the furnishings. It had been impossible for Bulstrode to pass indifferently the venders of flowers in the festive, brilliant streets, and great bunches of giroflé, hyacinths, and narcissi overflowed the earthenware pitchers and vases with which the studio was plentifully supplied. The soft, sharp fragrance rose above the shut-in odor of the atelier, and, while Miss Desprey worked, her patron looked at her across waves of spring perfume.

Her painting-dress, a garment of beige linen, half belted in at the waist and entirely covering her, made her to Bulstrode, from the crown of her fair hair to the tip of her old tan shoes, seem all of one color. He had taken tremendous interest in his pose, in the progress of the work. He would have looked at the portrait every few moments, but Miss Desprey refused him even a glimpse. He was to wait until all manner of strange things took place on the canvas, till "schemes and composition" were determined, "proper values" arrived at, and he listened to her glib school terms with respect and a sanguine hope that with the aid of such potent technicalities and his interest she might be able to achieve this time something short of atrocious.

He posed faithfully for Miss Desprey, and smiled at her with friendly eyes whenever he caught anything more personal than the squinting glance with which she professionally regarded him, putting him far away or fetching him near, according to her art's requirements. They talked in his rest, and he took pleasure in telling her how he enjoyed his morning walks from his hôtel, how the outdoor life delighted him, and how all the suburban gardens seemed to have been brought to Paris to glow and blossom in the venders' carts or in little baskets on the backs of women and boys, and how thoroughly well worth living he thought life in Paris was.

"There is," he finished, "nothing in the world which compares to the Paris spring-time, I believe, but I have never been West. What is spring like in Idaho?"

Miss Desprey laughed, touched her ruffled hair with painty fingers, blushed, and mused.

"Oh, it's all right, I guess. There's a trolley-line in Centreville, an electric plant and the oil works—no trees, no flowers, and the people all look alike. So you see"—she had a dazzling way of shaking her head, when her fine white teeth, her sunny dishevelled hair, her bright cheeks and eyes seemed all to flash and chime together—"so you see, spring in Centreville and Paris isn't the same thing at all! Things are beautiful everywhere," she assured him slowly as she painted, "if you're happy—and I was very unhappy in Centreville, so I thought I'd come away and try to have a career." She poured out a long stream of garance from the tube on to her palette. Bulstrode watched, fascinated.

"And here in Paris, are you—have you been happy here?"

"Oh, dear no!" she laughed; "perfectly miserable. And it used to seem as though it was cruel of the city to be so gay and happy when I couldn't join in—" Bulstrode, remembering the one franc a day and the very questionable inspiration her poor art could impart, understood; his face was full of feeling—"until," she went slowly on, "lately." She stepped behind the canvas and was lost to sight. "I've been awfully happy in Paris for the first time. I do like beautiful things—but I like beautiful people better—and you're beautiful—beautiful."

She finished with a blush and a smile.

Bulstrode grew to think nothing at all about his portrait further than fervently to hope it would not shock him beyond power to disguise. But Miss Desprey was frightfully in earnest, and worked until her eyes glowed with excitement and her cheeks burned. Strong and vigorous and (Bulstrode over and over again said) "young, so young!" she never evinced any signs of fatigue, but stood when his limbs trembled under him and looked up radiant when he was ready to cry "Grâce!" In her enthusiasm she would have given him two sittings a day, but this his worldly relations would not permit. As she painted, painted, her head on one side sometimes, sometimes thrown back, her eyes half closed, he studied her with pleasure and delight.

"What a pity she paints so dreadfully ill! What a pity she paints at all! What difference, after all, does it make what she does? She's so pretty and feminine!" She was a clinging, sweet creature, and the walk and the flower debauch he permitted himself, the long quiet hours of companionship with this lovely girl in the atelier, illumined, accentuated, and intensified Bulstrode's already fatuous appreciation of the spring in Paris.

During Bulstrode's artistic mornings there distilled itself into the studio a magic to which he was not insensitive. Whether or not it came with the flowers or with the delicate filtering of the sun through the studio light, who can say, but as he stood in his assumed position of nonchalance he was more and more charmed by his painter. The spell he naturally felt should, and for long indeed did, emanate from the slender figure, lost at times behind her canvas, and at times completely in his view.

For years Bulstrode had been the victim of hope, or rather in this case of intent, to love again—to love anew! Neither of these statements is the correct way of putting it. He tried with good faith to prove himself to be what was so generally claimed for him by his friends—susceptible; alas, he knew better!

As he meditatively studied the blonde young girl he spun for himself to its end the idea of picking her up, carrying her off, marrying her, shutting Idaho away definitely, and opening to her all that his wealth and position could of life and the world. He grew tender at the thought of her poor struggle, her insufficient art, her ambition. It fascinated him to think of playing the good fairy, of touching her gray, hard life to color and beauty, and as the beauty and the holy intimacy of home occurred to him, and marriage, his thoughts wandered as pilgrims whose feet stray back in the worn ways and find their own old footprints there, ... and after a few moments Miss Desprey was like to be farther away from his meditations than Centreville is from Paris, and the personality of the dream-woman was another. Once Miss Desprey's voice startled him out of such a reverie by bidding him, "Please take the pose, Mr. Bulstrode!" As he laughed and apologized he caught her eyes fixed on him with, as he thought, a curious expression of affection and sympathy—indeed, tears sprang to them. She reddened and went furiously back to work. She was more personal that day than she had yet been. She seemed, after having surprised his absent-mindedness, to feel that she had a right to him—quite ordered him about, and was almost petulant in her exactions of his positions.

Her work evidently advanced to her satisfaction.

As she stood elated before her easel, her hair in sunny disorder, her eyes like stars, Bulstrode was conscious there was a change in her—she was excited and tremulous. In her frayed dress, sagging at the edges, her paint-smeared apron, her slender thumb through the hole in the palette, she came over to him at the close of the sitting, started to speak, faltered, and said:

"You don't know what it means to me—all you have done. And I can't ever tell you."

"Oh, don't," he pleaded, "pray don't speak of it!"

Miss Desprey, half radiant and half troubled, turned away as if she were afraid of his eyes.

"No, I won't try to tell you. I couldn't, I don't dare," she whispered, and impulsively caught his hand and kissed it.

When he had left the studio finally it was with a bewildering sense of having kissed her hand—no, both of her hands! but one held her palette and he couldn't have kissed that one without having got paint on his nose—perhaps he had! He was not at peace.

That same night a telegram brought him news to the effect that Miss Desprey was ill and would not expect him to pose the following day; and relieved that it was not required of him to resume immediately the over-charged relations, he went back to his old habit, rudely broken into by his artistic escapade, and walked far into the Bois.

He thought with alarming persistency of Miss Desprey. He was chivalrous with women, old-fashioned and clean-minded and straight-lived. In the greatest, in the only passion of his life, he had been a Chevalier Bayard, and he could look back upon no incidents in which he had played the part which men of the world pride themselves on playing well. Women were mysterious and wonderful to him. Because of one he approached them all with a feeling not far from worship; and he had no intention of doing a dishonorable thing. Puzzled, self-accusing—although he did not quite know of what he was guilty—he sat down as he had done several weeks before on the bench in the Avenue des Acacias. With extraordinary promptness, as if arranged by a scene-setter, a girl's figure came quickly out of a side alley. She was young—her figure betrayed it. She went quickly over to a seat and sat down. She was weeping and covered her face with her hands. Bulstrode, this time without hesitation, went directly over to her:

"My dear Miss Desprey——"

She sprang up and displayed a face disfigured with weeping.

"You!" she exclaimed with something like terror. "Oh, Mr. Bulstrode!"

Her words shuddered in sobs.

"Don't stay here! Why did you come? Please go—please."

Bulstrode sat down beside her and took her hands.

"I'm not going away—not until I know what your trouble is. You were in distress when I first saw you here and you wouldn't let me help you then. Now you can't refuse me. What is it?"

He found she was clinging to his hands as she found voice enough to say:

"No, I can't tell you. I couldn't ever tell you. It's not the same trouble, it's a new one and worse. I guess it's the worst thing in the world."

Bulstrode was pitiless:

"One that has come lately to you?"

"Oh, yes!"

She was weeping more quietly now.

"Please leave me: please go, Mr. Bulstrode."

"A trouble with which I have had anything to do?"

She waited a long time, then faintly breathed:

"Yes."

The hand he firmly held was gloveless and cold—before he could say anything further she drew it away from him and cried:

"Oh, I ought never to have let you guess! You were so good and kind, you meant to help me so, but it's been the worst help of all, only you couldn't know that," she pleaded for him. "Please forgive me if I seem ungrateful, but if I had known that I was going to suffer like this I would have wished never to see you in the world."

Bulstrode was trying to speak, but she wouldn't let him:

"I never can see you again. Never! You mustn't come any more."

But here she half caught her breath and sobbed with what seemed naïve and adorable daring:

"Unless you can help me through, Mr. Bulstrode—it is your fault, after all."

If this were a virtual throwing of herself into his arms, they were all but open to her and the generous heart was all but ready "to see her through." Bulstrode was about to do, and say, the one rash and irrevocable perfect thing when at this minute fate again at the ring of the curtain opportuned. The tap, tapping, of a pony's feet was heard and a gay little cart came brightly along. Bulstrode saw it. He sprang to his feet. It was close upon them.

"You will let me come to-morrow?" he asked eagerly,

"Oh, yes," she whispered; "yes, I shall count on you. I beg you will come."

"Jimmy," said the lady severely as he accepted her invitation to get into the cart, "this is the second wicked rendezvous I have interrupted. I didn't know you were anything like this, and I've seen that girl before, but I can't remember where."

"Don't try," said Bulstrode.

"And she was crying. Of course you made her cry."

"Well," said Bulstrode desperately, "if I did, it's the first woman that has ever cried for me."

As the reason why Bulstrode had never married was again in Paris, he went up in the late afternoon to see her.

The train of visitors who showed their appreciation of her by thronging her doors had been turned away, but Bulstrode was admitted. The man told him, "Mrs. Falconer will see you, sir," by which he had the agreeably flattered feeling that she would see nobody else.

When he was opposite her the room at once dwindled, contracted, as invariably did every place in which they found themselves together, into one small circle containing himself and one woman. Mrs. Falconer said at once to Bulstrode:

"Jimmy, you're in trouble—in one of your quandaries. What useless good have you been doing, and who has been sharper than a serpent's tooth to you?"

Bulstrode's late companionship with youth had imparted to him a boyish look. His friend narrowly observed him, and her charming face clouded with one of those almost imperceptible nuances that the faces of those women wear who feel everything and by habit reveal nothing.

"I'm not a victim." Bulstrode's tone was regretful. "One might say, on the contrary, this time that I was possibly overpaid."

"Yes?"

"I haven't," he explained and regretted, "seen you for a long time."

"I've been automobiling in Touraine." Mrs. Falconer gave him no opportunity to be delinquent.

"And I," he confessed, "have been posing for my portrait. Don't," he pleaded, "laugh at me—it isn't for a miniature or a locket; it's life-size, horribly life-size. I've had to stand, off and on with the rests, three hours a day, and I've done so every day for three weeks."

Mrs. Falconer regarded him with indulgent amusement.

"It's your fault—you took me to see those awful school-girl paintings and pointed out that poor young creature to me." And he was interrupted by her exclamation:

"Oh, how dear of you, Jimmy! how sweet and kind and ridiculous! It won't be fit to be seen."

"Oh, never mind that," he waved; "no one need see it. I haven't—she won't let me."

He had accepted a cup of tea from the lady's hand; he drank it off and sat down, holding the empty cup as if he held his fate.

"Tell me," she urged, "all about it. It was just like you—any other man would have found means to show charity, but you have shown unselfish goodness, and that's the rarest thing in the world. Fancy posing every day! How ghastly and how wonderful of you!"

"No," he said slowly, "it wasn't any of these things. I wanted to do it. It amused me at first, you see. But now I am a little annoyed—rather bothered to tell the truth—He met her eyes with almost an appeal in his. Mrs. Falconer was in kindness bound to help him.

"Bothered? How, pray? With what part of it? You're not chivalrous about it, are you? You're not by the way of feeling that you have compromised her by posing?"

"Oh, no, no," he hurried; "but I do feel, and I am frank to acknowledge, that it was a mistake. Because—do you know—that for some absurd reason I am afraid she has become fond of me." He blushed like a boy. Mrs. Falconer said coldly:

"Yes? Well, what of it?"

"This—" Bulstrode's voice was quiet and determined—"if I am right I shall marry her."

Mrs. Falconer had the advantage over most women of completely understanding the man with whom she dealt. She knew that to attempt to turn from its just and generous source any intent of Mr. Bulstrode would have been as futile as to attempt to turn a river from its parent fountain.

"You're quixotic, I know, but you're not demented, and you won't certainly marry this nobody—whose fancies or love-affairs have not the least importance. You won't ever see her again unless you are in love with her yourself."

Bulstrode interrupted her hastily:

"Oh, yes, I shall."

He got up and walked over to the window that looked down on Mrs. Falconer's trim little garden. A couple of iron chairs and a table stood under the trees. Early roses had begun to bloom in the beds whose outlines were thick and dark with heart's-ease. Beyond the iron rail of the high wall the distant rumble of Paris came to his ears. Mrs. Falconer's voice behind him said:

"She's a very pretty girl, and young enough to be your daughter."

"No," he said quietly, "not by many years."

As he turned about and came back to the lady the room seemed to have grown darker and she to sit in the shadow. She leaned toward him, laughing:

"So you have come to announce at last the famous marriage of yours we have so often planned together."

Bulstrode stood looking down on her.

"I feel myself responsible," he said gravely. "She was going home, and by a mistaken impulse I came in and changed her plans. She is perfectly alone and perfectly poor, and I am not going to add to her perplexities. I have no one in the world to care what I do. I have no ties and no duties."

"No," said Mrs. Falconer; "you are wonderfully free."

He said vehemently:

"I am all of a sudden wonderfully miserable."

He had been in the habit for years of suddenly leaving her without any warning, and now he put out his hand and bade her good-by, and before she could detain him had made one of many brusque exits from her presence.

On the following day—a Sunday, as from his delightful apartments in the Ritz he set forth for the studio, Bulstrode bade good-by to his bachelor existence. He knew when he should next see the Place Vendôme it would be with the eyes of an engaged man. His life hereafter was to be shared by a "total stranger." So he pathetically put it, and his sentimental yearning to share everything with a lovely woman had died a sudden death.

"There's no one in the world to care a rap what I do—really," he reflected, "and in this case I have run up against it—that's the long and the short of the matter—and I shall see it through."

As he set out for Miss Desprey's along his favorite track he remarked that the gala, festive character of Paris had entirely disappeared. The season had gone back on him by several months, and the melancholy of autumn and dreary winter cast a gloom over his boyish spirits. A very slight rain was falling. Bulstrode began to feel a twinge of rheumatism in his arm and as he irritably opened his umbrella his spirits dropped beneath it and his brisk, springy walk sagged to something resembling the gait of a middle-aged gentleman. But he urged himself into a better mood, however, at the sight of a flower-shop whose delicate wares huddled appealingly close to the window. He went in and purchased an enormous bunch of—he hesitated—there were certain flowers he could not, would not send! The selection his sentimental reserve imposed therefore consisted of sweet-peas, giroflés, and a big cluster of white roses, all very girlish and virginal. His bridal offering in his hand, he took a cab and drove to the other side of the river with lead at his good heart and, he almost fancied, a lump in his throat. He paid the coachman, whose careless spirits he envied, and slowly walked down the picturesque alley of Impasse du Maine.

"There isn't a man I know—not a man in the Somerset Club—who would be as big a fool as this!"

He had more than a mind to leave the flowers on the doorstep and run. Bulstrode would have done so now that he was face to face with his quixotic folly, but his cab had been heard as well as his steps on the walk, and the door was opened by Miss Desprey herself. The girl's colorless face, her eyes spoiled with tears, and a pretty, sad dignity, which became her well, struck her friend with the sincerity and depth of her grief, and as the good gentleman shook hands with her he realized that less than ever in the world could he add a featherweight of grief to the burden of this helpless creature.

"My dearest child!" He lifted her hand to his lips.

"Oh, Mr. Bulstrode, I'm so glad you've come, I was so afraid you wouldn't—after yesterday!"

His arms were still full of white paper, roses, and sweet-peas.

"Oh, don't give them to me, Mr. Bulstrode! Oh, why, did you bring them? Oh, dear, what will you think of me?" She had possessed herself of the flowers and with agitation and distress hastily thrust them, as if she wanted to hide them, behind the draperies of the couch. Bulstrode murmured something of whose import he was scarcely conscious. As she came tearfully back to him she let him take her hands. He felt that she clung to him. "It would have spoiled my life if you hadn't come. I would have just gone and jumped in the Seine. I may yet. Oh, you don't understand! It's been hard to be poor—I've been often hungry—but this last thing was too much. When you found me yesterday I didn't want to live any more."

Bulstrode's kind clasp warmed the cold little hands. As tenderly as he could he looked at her agitated prettiness.

"Don't talk like that"—he tried for her first name and found it. "Laura, you will let me make it all right, my dear? You will let me, won't you? You shall never know another care if I can prevent it."

She interrupted with hasty gratitude:

"Nobody else can make it all right but you."

He tried softly:

"Did I, then, make it so very wrong?"

She murmured, too overcome to trust herself to say much:

"Yes!"

She was standing close to him, and lifted her appealing face to his. Her excitement communicated itself to him; he bent toward her about to kiss her, when the door of the studio sharply opened, and before Bulstrode could do more than swiftly draw back and leave Miss Desprey free an exceedingly tall and able-bodied man entered without ceremony.

The girl gave a cry, ran from Bulstrode, and, so to speak, threw herself against the arms of the stranger, for there were none open to receive her.

"Oh, here's Mr. Bulstrode, Dan! I knew he'd come; and he'll tell you—won't you, Mr. Bulstrode? Tell him, please, that I don't care anything at all about you and you don't care anything about me.... That you don't want to marry me or anything. Oh, please make him believe it!"

The poor gentleman's senses and brain whirling together made him giddy. He felt as though he had just been whisked up from the edge of a precipice over which he ridiculously dangled. Dan, who represented the rescuer, was not prepossessing. He was the complete and unspoiled type of Western youth; the girl herself was an imperfect and exquisite hybrid.

"I don't know that this gentleman can explain to me"—the young fellow threw his boyish head back—"or that I care to hear him."

She gave a cry, sharp and wounded. The sound touched the now normal, thoroughly grateful patron, who had come out of his ordeal with as much kindly sensibility as he went in.

"Of course, my dear young lady"—he perfectly understood the situation—"I will tell your friend the facts of our acquaintance. That's what you want me to do, isn't it?"

She was weeping and hanging on to the unyielding arm of her cross lover, who glared at the intruding Bulstrode with a youthful jealousy at which the older man smiled while he envied it. He pursued impressively:

"Miss Desprey has been painting my portrait for the past few weeks. I gave her the order at the Art League; other than painter and sitter we have no possible interest in each other—Mr.——"

"Gregs," snapped the stranger, "Daniel Gregs!"

The slender creature, whose eyes never left the stolid, uncompromising face, repeated eagerly:

"No possible interest—Dan—none! He doesn't care anything about me at all! You heard what he said, didn't you? I only like him like a kind, kind friend."

"I only like him like a kind, kind friend"

Her voice, soft as a flower, caressed and pleaded with the passionate tenderness of a woman who feels that an inadvertent word may keep for her or lose for her the man she adores.

"My dear man," exclaimed Bulstrode in great irritation, "you ought to be ashamed to let her cry like that! Can't you understand—don't you see?"

"No," shortly caught up the other, "I don't! I've come here from South Africa, where I'm prospecting some mines for a company at Centreville, and I heard she was poor and unhappy, and I hurried up my things so I could come to Paris and marry her and take her with me, and here I find her painting every day alone with a rich man, her place all fixed up with flowers, and a thousand dollars in the bank"—his cheek reddened—"I don't like it! And that's all there is to it!" he finished shortly.

"No, my friend," said the other severely, "there's a great deal more. If, from what you say, and the way you speak, you wish me to understand you have a real interest in Miss Desprey, you can follow me when I say that I came here and found her a lonely, forsaken girl, obliged to return to Idaho when she didn't want to go, without any money or any friends. May I ask you why, if there was any one in the world who cared for her, she should be left so deserted?"

The girl here turned her face from her lover to her champion.

"Don't please blame Dan for that. He was so poor, too. He didn't have anything when he went to South Africa; it was just a chance if he would succeed. And he was working for me, so that he could get married."

Gregs interrupted:

"I don't owe this gentleman any explanation!"

"No," accepted the other gently, "perhaps not, but you mustn't, on the other hand, refuse to hear mine. Be reasonable. Why shouldn't Miss Desprey have an order for a portrait?"

Gregs, over the golden head against his arm, looked at Bulstrode:

"She can't paint!" His tone was gentler. "Laura can't paint, and you know it!"

"Dan!" she whispered; "how cruel you are to me!"

And here the desperate Bulstrode broke in:

"He is, indeed, Miss Desprey, cruel and unjust, and I frankly ask leave to tell him so. You don't deserve the girl, Mr. Gregs, if she's yours, as she seems to be."

But the girl clung closer, as if she still feared Bulstrode might try to rescue her.

"That's all right," frowned the miner. "I am no better and no worse than any man about his girl, and I'm going to know just where I stand!"

The gentleman's reply was caustic. "I should be inclined to say you'd find it hard to be in a better place."

Laura Desprey had wound her arms around Mr. Gregs. Bulstrode held out his hand. She couldn't take it, nor could her lover. With arrogant obstinacy he had folded his arms across his chest.

"Come, can't we be friends?" urged the amiable gentleman. "I seem to have made trouble when I only wanted to be friendly. Let me set it right before I go. I am lunching in Versailles, and I have to take the noon train from the Gare Montparnasse."

But Daniel Gregs did not unbend to the affable proposition. Miss Desprey said:

"When you saw me yesterday in the park, Mr. Bulstrode, Dan had just come back the day before. I was putting the flowers you sent me in fresh water when he came in on me all of a sudden. Oh, it was so splendid at first! I was so happy—until he asked all about you, and then he grew so angry and said unless you could explain to him a lot of things he would go away and never see me again, and when you found me I was crying because I thought he had left me forever. I hadn't seen him for two years, and if you hadn't helped me to stay on here I should have had to go to Idaho, and I wouldn't have seen him at all. You ought to thank him, Dan."

Bulstrode interrupted:

"Indeed, Mr. Gregs, you should, you know!—you should thank me; come, be generous."

Dan relaxed his grim humor a little.

"When I get through with this South African business I'm going back to Centreville, and if I ever get her out of this Paris she'll never see it again!"

"Dan," she breathed, "I don't want to. Centreville is good enough for me."

(Centreville! The horrible environment he was to have snatched her from. Bulstrode smiled softly.)

"But this money," pursued the dogged lover, returning to his grudge. "You've got to take it back, Mr. Bulstrode. No picture on earth is worth a thousand dollars, and certainly not Laura's."

"Oh, Dan!" she exclaimed.

But her friend said firmly: "The portrait is mine. Come, don't be foolish. If Miss Desprey is willing to marry you and go out to Idaho, take the money and buy her some pretty clothes and things."

Here the girl herself interrupted excitedly:

"No, no! We couldn't take it. I don't want any new clothes. If Dan doesn't care how shabby I am, I don't. I don't want anything in the world but just to go with Dan."

At this sweet tenderness Dan's face entirely changed, his arms unfolded; he put them around her.

"That's all right, little girl." His tone thrilled through Bulstrode more than the woman's tears had done. He understood why she wanted to go to him, and how she could be drawn. He had at times in his life lost money, and sometimes heavily, and he had never felt poor before. In the same words, but in a vastly different tone, Dan Gregs held out his hand to Bulstrode.

"That's all right, sir. When a fellow travels thousands and thousands of miles to get his girl and hasn't much more than his car fare and he runs up against another fellow who has got the rocks and all and who he thinks is sweet on his girl, it makes him crazy—just crazy!"

"I see"—Bulstrode sympathetically understood—"and I don't at all wonder."

They were all three shaking hands together and Bulstrode said:

"Would you believe it, I haven't seen my portrait, Miss Desprey."

Dan Gregs grinned.

"Don't," he said, "don't look at it. It's what made all the trouble. When I saw it yesterday and Laura told me it had drawn a thousand dollars—why I said 'there isn't a man living who would give you fifty cents for it.' That made her mad at first. Then she told me you thought she was a great portrait-painter, and I knew you must be sweet on her. I'm fond of her all right, but I decided that you were bound to have her and didn't care how you dealt your cards, and I thought I'd clear out."

His face fell and threatened to cloud over, but it cleared again as with the remembrance of his doubts came the actual sense of the woman whose face was hidden on his breast, and he lightly touched the dusty golden hair.

When in a few seconds Bulstrode took leave of them, Miss Desprey, in her dingy painting-dress, seemed completely swallowed up in the embrace of the big Dan Gregs. From where he stood by the door Bulstrode could see the white corner of his fiançailles bouquet sticking out from the draperies of the couch. The paper was open and in the heat of the warm little atelier the fresh odor of the pungent flowers came strongly on the air.

Bulstrode as he said good-by seemed to say it—and to look at the lovers—through a haze of perfume—a perfume that, like the most precious things in the world, pervades and affects, suggests and impresses, while its existence is unseen, unknown to the world.

Once in his train, he had been able to catch it at the Invalides after all, Jimmy drew a long breath and settled back into himself, for, he had been, poor dear, during the past three weeks, in another man's shoes and profiting by another man's identity. It was perfectly heavenly to feel that he had been liberated by the merciful providence which takes care to provide the right lover for the right place. He couldn't be too grateful for the miracle which saved him from a sacrifice alongside of which Abraham's would have been a jest indeed.

The June morning was warm and through the open car window, as the train went comfortably along, the perfume of the country came into him where he sat. Opposite, a pair of lovers frankly and naturally showed their annoyance at the third person's intrusion, and Bulstrode, sympathetically turned himself about and became absorbed in Suburban Paris. His heart beat high at the fact of his deliverance. His gratitude was sincere—moreover, his thoughts were of an agreeable trend, and he was able to forget everybody else within twelve miles. Secure in his impersonality and in the indifference of his broad unseeing back, the lovers kissed and held hands.

Bulstrode wandered slowly up from the Versailles station to the Hôtel des Reservoirs, crossed the broad square of the Palace Court, found the pink and yellow façade more mellow and perfect than ever, and toward twelve-thirty strolled into the yard of the old hostelry. Breakfast had been set for twelve-thirty, but his host was not there.

"Ah—mais, bon jour, Monsieur Bulstrode!" The proprietor knew and appreciated this client greatly.

Monsieur Falconer, it seemed, had been called suddenly to Paris.... Yes—well—there were, now and then, in the course of life, bits of news that could be borne with fortitude. "And Madame has also been called to Paris?"

"Mais non!" Madame had a few minutes since gone out in the Park, the proprietor thought she would not be very far away.

Bulstrode thanked him, and crossed over to the hedge and the gateway and through it to the Palace Gardens. On all sides the paths stretched broad and inviting toward the various alleys, and upon the terrace to his left there shone a thousand flowers in June abundance. The gentleman chose the first path that opened, and went carelessly down it, and in a few moments the pretty ring of an embowered circle spread before him, but, although there was an inviting marble bench under a big tree at one side, and several eighteenth century marbles on their pedestals, illuminated by the bland eighteenth century smile, there was not a living woman in sight to make him, the visitor, welcome! He went a little further along and found another felicitous, harmonious circle, where a small fountain threw its jets on the June air. At the sound of the water Bulstrode remembered that the Grands Eaux were to play on this afternoon at Versailles.

"Ah, that is why they especially wanted me to come out to-day," he decided.

On the other side of the fountain, the vivid white of her summer dress making a flash like moonlight on the obscurity of the woods, a lady was standing looking across at Mr. Bulstrode.

"Hush!" she said; "come over softly, Jimmy; there is a timid third party here."

On a branch at her side, where an oriole sat, his head thrown back, his throat swelling, there was a little stir and flutter of leaves, for although the lady had put her finger to her lips, her voice broke the spell, and a bit of yellow flashed through the trees.

"I don't believe he will ever forgive you!" she cried; "you spoiled his solo, but I'll forgive you. What brought you out to Versailles to-day?"

"The fountains," Bulstrode told her; "I have never seen them play. Then, too—there are certain places to which, when I am asked to luncheon, I always go."

"That's quite true," she accepted; "you were invited!—but, to be perfectly frank, I did not expect you, so your coming on this occasion has only the pleasure of a surprise. As a rule, I hate them. My husband informed me that he would telephone you to meet him in Paris, but I think he must have forgotten you, Jimmy."

She was taking him in from his fresh panama to his boots, and she apparently found an air of festivity about him.

"Was it," she asked, "in honor of the fountains' playing that you have made yourself so beautiful?"

Bulstrode took the boutonnière out of his coat lapel and handed it to her. "Can't you pin it in somewhere?" Mrs. Falconer laughed and thrust the carnation into her bodice.

"I dressed to-day, more or less," Mr. Bulstrode confessed, "in order to attend—well, what shall I call it—a betrothal? That's a good old-fashioned word."

"Oh!" exclaimed the lady, "a fiançailles?"

"Yes."

The two had wandered slowly along, out of the Bosquet towards the canals.

"They make a great deal of these functions in France," Mrs. Falconer said.

Her companion agreed. "They made a great deal, rather more than usual, out of this one." And his tone was so suggestive that his companion looked up at him quickly.

"Who are your mysterious lovers?" she asked, "are they French? Do I know them?"

"They are not in the least mysterious," Bulstrode assured her. "I never saw anything less complex and more simple. They are Americans."

She seemed now to understand that she was to hear of "one of Jimmy's adventures," as she called his dashes in other people's affairs.

"I hope, Jimmy, in this case, that you have pulled the affair off to your credit, and that if you have made a match the creatures will be grateful to you for once! And, by the way," she bethought; "whatever has happened to the pretty girl whom you were quixotic enough to think you had to marry?"

"The last time I saw her she appeared to be in the best of circumstances," Bulstrode answered cheerfully. "In point of fact—it was, singularly enough, to her engagement party that I went to-day!"

And Mrs. Falconer now showed real interest and feeling. "No! how delightful. So she is really off your hands, Jimmy. Well, that is too good to be true. There's one at least whom you don't have to marry, Jimmy!"

"Oh, they grow beautifully less," he agreed.

Mrs. Falconer smiled softly.

"They are narrowing down every year," Jimmy went on; "when I am about sixty the number will be reduced, I dare say, to the proper quantity."

"What a goose you are," she said jestingly. "What a tease and a bother you are, Jimmy Bulstrode; I'll find you a proper wife!"

He accepted warmly. "Do, do! I leave myself quite in your hands."

His companion extended him her hand as she spoke, and after lifting it to his lips, Bulstrode drew it through his arm. It was clothed in a glove of pale coffee-color suede. It was a soft, dear hand, and rested as if it were at home on Bulstrode's gray sleeve. Side by side the two friends walked slowly out toward the broader avenues leading to the canals. The sky was faintly blue, touched with the edges of some drifting cloud, like dashes of foam. The trees about them lifted dark velvet masses and the air was sweet with the scent of the woods and flowers.

"Isn't this the most beautiful garden in the world?" murmured Mrs. Falconer. "Isn't it too beautiful!"

"Very," he incorrectly and vaguely answered. And the lady went on to say how brilliant she found the place with the suggestions and memories of the past royal times, whilst Bulstrode said nothing at all, because he did not want to tell her that Versailles and the charming alleys, and France, and the great big world, from limit to limit, was full of no ghosts to him, but of just one woman.

THE THIRD ADVENTURE

III

IN WHICH HE FINDS THERE ARE SOME THINGS WHICH ONE CANNOT BUY

After not a great deal of hesitation, toward the middle of a warm June, Bulstrode permitted himself to become the proprietor of a palace: not an inhabitant of the ordinary dwelling modelled after some old-world wonder, wherein American millionaires choose to spend their leisure in their own country—but of a real traditional palace, in whose charming rooms no object was younger than Bulstrode's great-grandfather, and where the enchanting women of the Fragonards and Nattiers almost made him, as he mused upon them, lose sight for a moment of a living lady.

On the very first day he went over the Hôtel Montensier from grenier to caves, Jimmy Bulstrode gave in, and accepted the Duc de Montensier's proposition to "fetch his traps for a few months to the hôtel and turn Parisian." He was in the heart of Paris, yet all around him, shut in by high walls, was a garden, to which the terraces of the house gave in flights of marble steps. When his friend suggested that Bulstrode turn Parisian, Jimmy laughed. "Do you think," he had asked, "that a chap born in Providence, educated in Harvard, and, if cosmopolitan, thoroughly American from start to finish, could, mon cher, turn Parisian?" And the Duc had assured him that he did not think Bulstrode had a "Latin eyelash," and that he needn't be at all afraid to try his luck at what a French house would do for him! "Why, your coat alone—the cut of it—" Montensier had laughed, "speaks of Poole with a Boston compromise!

The Duc had been in the United States—moreover, the Frenchman had plans of his own and he wanted very much to go to Newport and leave his house in the care of Jimmy Bulstrode. Whether the Puritan in him led Bulstrode to excuse to himself his enjoyment of so much luxury, at any rate he apologized, saying that nobody could expect a man with a love of the beautiful, and who had more or less a desire to shut himself up and to shut himself away for a time, to refuse.

The Falconers were off somewhere en auto. He had thought they had gone through Spain. It was pretty hot to do such a thing, however, and he did not really know. He wanted very much to be able not to let himself follow them, and he knew that there was little chance of his reaching such stoicism unless he began by not finding out where they were going! So he shut himself up with the books which the library offered and gave many charming little dinners and parties on his terraces in the bland summer nights, and tried with all his might and main to forget the flight of a certain motor over the fair white roads and, above all, to nerve himself up to refuse an invitation for the middle of July.

Directly opposite the white façade of the Montensiers' hôtel was a hostelry for beggars, for domestics without places; for poor professors; for actors with no stages but the last; for laborers with no labor; in short, for the riff-raff of the population, for those who no longer hold the dignity of profession or pay rent for a term. Sometimes Bulstrode would look out at the tenement, whose windows in this season were wide open; and the general aspect indicated that dislocated fortunes flourished. In one window, pirouetting or dancing in it, calling out of it, leaning perilously over the sill of it, was a child—as far as Bulstrode could decide, a creature of about six years of age. She was too small to see much of, but all he saw was activity, gesticulation, and perpetual motion. When the day was hot she fanned herself with a bit of paper. She called far out to the wine-merchant's wife, who sat with her family before the shop while her pretty children played in the gutter.

In Paris, when the weather climbs to eighty, Parisians count themselves in the tropics and the people, who lived apparently out of doors altogether, wore a melted, disheartened air. But the De Montensier garden, full of roses and heliotrope, watered and refreshed by the fountains' delightful falling, was a retreat not to be surpassed by many suburbs. Bulstrode gave little dinners on the terrace; little suppers after the theatre, when rooms and garden were lighted with fairy lanterns, and his chef outdid his traditions to please his American master.

One day as the American sat smoking on the terrace with nothing more disturbing than the drip of the fountain and the remote murmur of Paris to break his reverie, Prosper, his confidential man, made a tentative appearance.

"Would m'sieu, who is so good, see a young lady?"

His master smiled as he rose, instinctively at the words "jeune demoiselle," throwing away his cigar.

"Pardon, m'sieu, I thought it might amuse m'sieu—" and Prosper stepped back.

Bulstrode had been intently thinking of the caravansary opposite him, and he now saw that part of the hôtel meublé had come across the street; he recognized it immediately for the smallest part. Before him stood the ridiculous and pathetic figure of a dirty little girl in rags, tatters, and furbelows, her legs clad in red silk stockings evidently intended for fuller, shapelier limbs; her feet slipped about in pattens. She had on a woman's bodice, a long flounced skirt pinned up to keep her from tripping. Her head was adorned by a torn straw hat, also contrived and created for the coquetry of maturity.

"Monsieur is so good," she began in a flute-like voice. "I have come to thank monsieur with all my heart."

Bulstrode looked toward Prosper for enlightenment, but that individual had cleverly disappeared.

"To thank me, my child? But for what?"

"Why, for the eggs and butter and sugar that monsieur was so good as to send me. I have made the cake. It is beautiful! Monsieur le cuisinier of this house baked it for me. It is perhaps a little flat—but that was because I got tired stirring. See—it says—" She had, so he now saw, a book under her arm; letting fall a fold of her cumbersome dress with both hands and opening a filthy cook-book, she laid it on the table, bending over it. "It says stir briskly half an hour." (Her "rs" rolled in her throat like tiny cannons in a rosy hollow.) "Quelle idée! It was too stupid! Half an hour! I just mixed it round once or twice and then—voila! it has white on the top and shall have a candle."

"So you've made a cake?" he said kindly. "I'm sure it's a good one."

She nodded brightly. "It is for that I came to thank monsieur and to ask if he would accept a piece of it."

Poor Bulstrode, with dreadful suspicion, looked to see part of the horror immediately offered for his degustation. "I don't, my dear, understand. Why should you thank me—what had I to do with it?"

Her gesture was delightful. "But for monsieur it would not exist; for butter, eggs, and flour. Monsieur Prosper, when he gave them, said it was of the kindness of 'Monsieur Balstro.'"

(Oh, Prosper! "I have corrupted him," his master thought. "He is as bad as I am!")

"Well, I'm very glad indeed," and he said it heartily. "But what did you especially want to make it for—with the one candle? That means one year old. Who's birthday may it then be?"

"It is the birthday of maman." She shut the book, and as she did so raised her great black eyes, which dirt and neglect could not spoil. There was in her appearance so little suggestion of maternal care that Bulstrode nearly incredulously asked, "Your mother? And what, then, does your mother do?"

"She's a fish," informed the child tranquilly. And Bulstrode, although startled, could believe it. It too perfectly accounted for the cold-blooded indifference to this offspring. Not even a mermaid could have been guilty of so little care for her child. Still, he repeated:

"A fish?"

"Oui, a devil-fish in the aquarium at Bostock's. Oh, que c'est beau!" she clasped her little hands. "Maman wears a costume of red—quite a small, thin dress," she described eagerly. "And it is all spangles, like fire when she dives into the water. I have been; the waiter at the café downstairs took me. I screamed. I thought maman was drowned. But no—she comes up always!" The child threw her head back and lifted her eyes in ecstasy. "C'est magnifique!"

"What is your mother's name?"

"Mademoiselle Lascaze."

"And yours?"

"Simone."

"What do you do all day, Simone?"

"I wash and cook and sew and play—I have much to do—oh, much." She assumed an important air. "The bad air of the room makes maman ill, so she's out—'to breathe,' she says—and she locks me safely in. I play Bostock and dive like maman. And sometimes"—she lowered her voice, and looking back to see if they were alone—confided, "I cry."

"Ah!" sympathized Bulstrode.

"But, yes," she insisted, "when maman forgets to come home, and the night is so black; then the seamstress next door knocks on the wall, and I knock back for company."

"I see," he understood gently, "for company."

He rang for Prosper. "You will conduct mademoiselle home, Prosper, and give her everything she needs for her kitchen always."

"Yes, monsieur; I knew that monsieur would——"

At sight of Prosper the mite gathered up her voluminous skirts and bade her new friend a cordial good-by.

From the corrupted Prosper Bulstrode extracted what he wished to know concerning the child.

"It is of a scandalousness, monsieur! Four nights of the seven the poor little object is alone. The mother appears to have money enough, she pays her rent regularly, and there is therefore nothing to do. She sometimes even fetches her companions home with her, and Simone, when she is not making sport for them, is tied to a chair to keep her from falling off in her sleep."

Bulstrode expressed himself strongly, violently for him, went to see a lawyer and a charitable French countess and found out that so long as the mother did not actually ill-treat the child she could not be replaced by any other guardian.

"Mon cher ami," said the spirituelle lady, "leave the fish to her deviltry, and her child in her care. We are fin de race, if you like, and in direct opposition to your American progressive schemes, but we have a tradition that the family is sacred, and that, however bad it may be, a child is better off in its home than elsewhere. You will find it difficult to replace a mother by a machine or an institution, believe me."

And Bulstrode at the words felt a new sense of failure in philanthropies, and his benevolence seemed pure dilletantism. What was he likely to accomplish in the case of this child? Nothing more than the momentary pleasure a few toys and a few hours of play could secure. "And yet," as he mused he philosophically put it to himself, "isn't it, after all, about the sum total any of us get out of destiny?"

In New York he would have quite known how to proceed in order to help the child, but in the face of French law and strong family prejudice he came up against a stone wall.

"I'm no sort of a real benefactor," he remorsefully acceded, "and I don't believe I'm fit to be trusted alone with the poor."

Nevertheless he did not relinquish his idea entirely, and confided Simone to Prosper's sympathetic care and that of an emotional maid-servant, with the result that a cleaning woman penetrated by hook or crook into the room of "the fish" and treated it to more aqua pura than the piscatory individual had cognizance of outside of the aquarium.

The gentleman in this particular charity was surprised to find how simple it sometimes is to do good. In this case no one had come to him with a petition or a demand; on the contrary, a note of undeserved thanks had, with the strange little creature, been presented to him. It was so pleasantly easy to help a child! There were no arrières pensées—not that they would have troubled him, but there were none; there were no wire-pullings, no time infringements, no suggestion or criticism, no—he believed—expectations. Everything he could do was so annoyingly little! The charwoman cleaned, Simone had a complete wardrobe, the larder was full, and there remained nothing but toys to buy. The little thing was so womanly and capable—he had seen it and marvelled in their interviews at her age and accomplishments—her hands were so apt and almost creative, that toys seemed inadequate. She took her benefits charmingly; rushed over at the least provocation to pour out her gratitude, and Bulstrode, who hated thanks, liked these. Childhood, if it had been for sale on the Boulevard, even that he would have bought Simone if he could! As it was, he found himself pausing before a series of shops other than chemisièrs—florists, and jewellers'—shops where diminutive objects were displayed—and one afternoon had been standing ridiculously long in front of a certain window on the Rue de Rivoli when he was accosted by an agreeable and familiar voice.

"Jimmy! It isn't possible! don't tell me it has come so cruelly soon?"

The gentleman gave a violent, but an entirely happy start. Well, there were rewards then for people who didn't follow speeding motors through France! She was back and in Paris.

"What—has come so soon?" he asked.

Mrs. Falconer, on her way from a hat shop in her automobile, stopped by his side.

"Why, your second childhood, my dear man. Do you know what shop you are standing before?"

Bulstrode seemed to be perfectly aware of his dotage and to delight in it. Behind the big window pane there was a bright and very juvenile display.

Ships sailed there; dolls hung gaudily and smilingly aloft; giant parti-colored balls rounded out their harlequin sides; tiny dishes for pygmy festivals were piled with delicious carrots and artichokes on little white, blue-rimmed platters.

"Have you a moment to spare?" Bulstrode asked her.

"I have bought all my hats," she replied; "after that a woman's time hangs heavy on her hands."

"Ah!" he was as radiant as she had the genius for making him. "Come, then, in with me and help me choose a doll."

It was not the first purchase during the course of a long friendship which Bulstrode had made with this charming woman by his side, but for some reason he enjoyed it more than former errands. The bachelor and the childless woman were hard to please and their choice consumed an unconscionable time. As they lingered, the amiable shopman pressed various toys on monsieur and madame "pour les enfants," and the lady, finally depositing her friend with his parcels at the door of his hôtel, realized as she drove away that she knew nothing of the child for whom the purchases had been made. On her way up the Champs Elysées she smiled softly. "It's what you share," she mused, "what you give of yourself—with yourself—that's charity! Jimmy gives himself. I wonder who his new love is?"

Bulstrode, in order to share what should be his "new love's" ecstasy at first sight of the miraculous toy, sent for Simone. The Rue de Rivoli doll, on a small chair designed for diminutive ladies of the eighteenth century or for the king's dwarfs, held out stiff but cordial arms and was naturally, to a child, the first and sole object of the drawing-room.

"Monsieur!"

"For you, Simone."

"Monsieur!"

She said nothing else as she clasped her hands, and the color rushed into her face, but she felt the doll, touched reverently its feet, hair, dress, incontinently forgot Bulstrode, and quite suddenly, passionately, caught the image of life to her heart. Just over its blonde head, for it was nearly as large as herself, she met the gentleman's eyes.

"It's my child! I've prayed for it always, always! I've never had a doll, a bébé, m'sieu."

The tea-table with cakes and chocolate called them all too soon and, as Prosper served, the fountains sang, the heat stole through the garden and called up agreeable odors of sod and roses, the late afternoon sky spread its expanse over the terrace of the hôtel, where, perfectly happy both of them, animated by as gentle and harmless pleasure as any two in Paris that day, the child of the people and an American gentleman chatted over their tea.

Bulstrode, being an original, erratic, and reckless giver of alms, quite by this time knew that, more than often, for him to give was, if not to regret, to have at least misgivings whether in the hands of some colder, less poetic person his money would not have accomplished more good. In the case of Simone he had, as usual, happily gone on with abandon, relegating any remorse to a future which he hoped would never arrive.

But the middle of July did come and with it came poor Jimmy's exquisite temptation. A telephone helped it dreadfully. There was something so wonderful in the fact that in a couple of hours he could, if he would, let himself reach the side of the lovely voice which called to him over the wires. And being nothing but a human man, he threw all his good resolves to the wind, and went down and stayed three days at Fontainebleau.

Out under the sky, where the elastic earth sprang softly beneath her feet and the embowered forests were sifted through with gold, Mary Falconer finally asked him, "And your doll, Jimmy? Have you broken her yet?" Bulstrode felt a guilty twinge, for he had not once thought of the little girl, nor did Mrs. Falconer's mention of her bring the subject near enough for Bulstrode to tell her the pretty story. He had other things to say, and many things not to say, and this, as it always did when he was with his lady, kept him very absorbed and occupied. On this occasion he forgot all about little Simone.

The night of his return Paris was en fête and in no sense impatient to reach his lonely house—for it seemed to him this night the loneliest house in the world—he walked without haste up town along the quays.

It was hard to forget that not fifty miles away he had left the cool forests, their tempting roads, their alluring alleys. He had forgotten that it was the annual celebration and that at this late hour the fête would be in full swing, and as he strolled meditating along the Seine the spirit of the gay populace—good-humor, reckless pleasure, and the joie de vivre—poured itself out around him like cordial, like a generous gift from an over-charged horn of cheer. In his gray clothes, modish panama, a little white rose plucked by a dear hand from the trellis at Fontainebleau still in his buttonhole, Bulstrode scarcely remarked the crowds or heard the music as he passed outdoor dancing stands and was jostled by a dancing throng.

His own street, as he approached it, welcomed him with a strong odor of onions and fried potatoes; it had apparently turned itself out of doors and all of the houses seemed to have emptied themselves into the narrow alley. A hurdy-gurdy playing before the hôtel meublê tinkled and jangled in the centre of a crowd of merry-makers, and the metallic melody and wild ascending octaves were the first sounds Bulstrode consciously heard since he left Fontainebleau.

In the midst of this rabble little Simone was dancing like a mad child, hair, arms, and feet flying; her voice, thin and piercing, every now and then above the rattle of the hand-organ, cried out the lines of a popular song whose meaning on her lips was particularly horrifying. The wine-shop family encircled her, encoring her vociferously. As she paused for breath the light from over the shop-door shone on her excited little face.

In the midst of this rabble little Simone was dancing

"I tired! Mon Dieu, que non! I could dance till morning. Play again, monsieur l'organiste. Play again."

Bulstrode, on the crowd's edge, watched her, and for once in his philanthropic history made no attempt to rescue. As Prosper let his master in he said:

"It's a shame, isn't it, monsieur? The people over there have let her run quite crazy. The poor little thing! Heaven knows where the mother is!"

Of which celestial knowledge Bulstrode had his doubts. It was close to twelve, and dismissing Prosper for the night, he took his cigar out on the terrace and to what solitude his garden might extend. Before long the noise of the music subsided, the people, tired out with hours of festivity, dispersed, and the alley settled into quiet. From the distance now and then came the soft, dull explosion of fireworks, the rumble and roar of Paris was a little accelerated; otherwise the silence about Bulstrode's garden grew and deepened as the night advanced.

It was rare for him to allow himself to be the object of his own personal consideration, or that indeed he at all thought of himself, and when he did the man he had long ignored had his revenge and made him pay up old scores.

On the late afternoon of this very day he was to have walked for miles through the Fontainebleau woods with Mrs. Falconer, and instead he had fled. Pleading a sudden summons to Paris, he left Fontainebleau.

It was well past four o'clock when he at last threw his cigar away and rose. He had been musing all night in his chair.

A sudden gust of noise blew down the quiet little street, the sound of loud singing and the shrill staccato of a woman's laugh. By the time the revellers had passed his house and the hubbub had died away, Bulstrode, with an idea at length of going up to his room, walked across the salon and prepared to extinguish the electricity, but the sound of some one tapping without caught his ear, and going over to the window that gave on the street, he looked out. From end to end the alley was deserted except for the figure of a woman. As he saw in the ruddy light of early morning she huddled against the threshold of the hôtel meublé—knocking persistently at the door. The tattered gauze of her dress, whose bold decolletée left her neck and shoulders bare, a garland of roses on the bandeaux of her black hair, she epitomized the carnival just come to its end—its exhaustion, its excess, spent at length, surfeited, knocking for entrance at last to rest. Bulstrode, as he remarked the sinuous figure that swayed as the woman stood, exclaimed to himself with illumination: "Why, she's the fish, of course! Simone's mother! And this is the state in which she goes to the miserable child!"

As, knocking at intervals, the object leaned there a few moments longer, evidently scarcely able to stand, his pity wakened and he slowly left the window, shut in its blinds, and crossed his ante-chamber, where the artificial light of electricity was met by the full sunshine of the breaking day streaming in through the open window of his terrace. Not entirely sure of his motive or to what excess of folly it might lead him, he nevertheless opened wide his front door, only to see that the woman on the opposite street had gone. She had been let in. With a glance of relief up and down the street where the confetti in disks of lilac and yellow and red lay in dirty piles or swam on the flushing gutters that sparkled in the light, Bulstrode shot to his door on the Parisian world and after a nuit blanche went upstairs to his rooms.

And there had intensely come to him during the period of his dressing the next morning after a tardy wakening the idea of taking the child, of—he was certain it could be done—buying the mother off. He would, in short, if he could, legally adopt the Parisian gamine for his own. It would give him a distinct interest, and life was empty for want of one; this, in a manner, however short of perfect, would supply the need of a loving living creature in his environment and would—his thrill at the idea proved to him how lonely he had been—give him companionship and a responsibility of a tender, personal sort. He could make a home at last for a child. Men are more paternal than they are credited with being, and Bulstrode directly foresaw delightful causeries in the future with—(he knew many women)—with one woman whose pretty taste, whose wit and humor, should counsel him in his new rôle. Mrs. Falconer would dress Simone—her hand should be wonderfully in it all. Bulstrode had let his fancy linger over the scheme. Certainly, during the hour in which he spun his fanciful plan, there was not one bar to its execution. Nor did there come to him any hint of its intrinsic sterility, or the idea that it was possibly an excuse for the interweaving of another interest more closely with his life—no idea that he was simply strengthening an old bond, or by means of this little tug pushing a mighty vessel nearer port.

He almost happily mused until a nursery grew out of thin air, a child's little garments lay on a chair, and festivities, whose charm is of the most mysterious, illuminated his reverie. Bulstrode, even without the shudder of the climatician, contemplated the rigors of his own country, for a rosy room grew out of his dream, fire-lit and fragrant with fir and holly, and in the centre shone The Tree, whose shiny globes and marvels were reflected till they danced in a child's eyes.

There had been an hour earlier the quick, brusque dash of a French thunder-storm, and the cooled air came refreshingly from the garden as Bulstrode stood out on the terrace before going into the noonday breakfast. Prosper, fetching his master's coffee at nine o'clock, had been informed that they were leaving Paris that day and received instructions as to the setting in order of the hôtel before returning it to its proprietor. Where his wanderings were to take him Bulstrode had not as yet made up his mind. It, after all, mattered so very little what a bachelor did with his leisure! It was the height of the season along the seacoast and a dozen places brilliantly beckoned; there were tri-weekly boats to the country, where he should most properly be.

"There is," he with recurrent leeway to his inclinations reflected, "always plenty of time to decide what one does not want to do!"

As he glanced at the little breakfast spread temptingly there for him on the terrace he was arrested by the sound of French voices in quick, agitated discussion, and looked up to see the unceremonious entrance of quite a little band of people who had in point of fact penetrated his seclusion. In a second of time a group was before him and he remembered afterward that certain figures in a twinkling assumed familiar shapes: the wine-shop keeper, his wife, one or two other patrons of the hôtel; but in the centre—he was sure of her!—pale and staring, stood little Simone, her big doll clasped in her arms.

Before the gentleman could ask their errand Madame Branchard, eager to tell it, pushed forward. Bulstrode afterward, when he thought of the scene, could always distinctly see her important red face, sleek, oily hair, and in spite of summer heat the crocheted shawl over her cotton gown.

"We decided at once to address to monsieur, who is so good"—(he was growing accustomed to the formula) "to monsieur who has been so like a father to the poor little thing. Not but that we are ready ourselves to do all we can for her—she is so sweet, so intelligent!"

"The sweet, intelligent child" appeared, as Bulstrode's pitying gaze, never leaving her, saw, to have shrunk overnight. In their midst she stood of a ridiculous smallness, her big doll nearly hiding her and over its blonde head Simone's eyes peered pathetically into, as it were, a vague and terrifying world. Bulstrode asked shortly in the face of the theatrical prelude:

"What is this all about? What have you come to tell me?"

"Ah, monsieur!" Madame Branchard's voice, particularly suited to retailing the tragedies of the streets, quavered. "There has been a malheur—it is too horrible—the mother!"

"Stop!" Bulstrode put out his hand. "Simone!"

The little thing dragged herself to him with a new timidity, as though she believed him in league with the world against her.

"Come," he encouraged, "come out here on the terrace, where you have so often played with your doll, and don't be frightened, mon enfant; everything will be all right."

When he had so settled her in the smallest of chairs he went back to the other bit of Paris street-life which had seethed in to him.

Madame Branchard, whom his manner had reduced to, for her, marvellous quiet and ease, approached impressively and lowered her voice as deeply as it would fall.

"Mademoiselle Lascaze, whom monsieur knows has been my tenant for months past, is dead—dead, monsieur!"

Bulstrode echoed, "Dead?" and his first thought was: "It was not she, then, whom I saw striving for entrance this morning. Ah, poor creature! Drowned?"

"Monsieur then knows?"

Knows—how should he know? He had thought of the aquarium and her often repeated feat.

"Monsieur is right, she is drowned; but it is not the aquarium—it is the Seine. It appears," the wine-merchant's wife went on, "that last night she made la fête in the streets. We over here lock up, well, at a decent hour, as monsieur will understand. Those who are in stay, those who are out—well, monsieur will understand——"

Yes, he understood. Would she go on?

"Mademoiselle Lascaze had evidently lost her key of entry—so it appears. We have this story from her comrades, a bad lot, like herself. She tried to get in about five o'clock—they left her knocking at the door. She must then have wandered the streets for an hour, for it was six when they met her again by chance quite by the Pont des Arts. They all had something to drink and started across the river, when the poor thing offered to give an exhibition of her circus feat and, before anyone could stop her, had dived off the bridge into the Seine."

He had, then, seen her knocking there in the dawn, and if he had hastened a little—not held conventionally back——

"It is all en règle," assured Madame Branchard. "As my husband will tell monsieur, he has been to the morgue to identify her."

The wine-merchant now at his cue, nodded impressively. "Mais oui, I assure monsieur she was quite natural—and she was une belle femme tout le même——"

His wife glanced at him scornfully. "She was a bad mother, and all the house will tell you so. Many times, monsieur, I have gone in with my pass-key and taken the poor little thing downstairs in my arms to give her all the supper she would have had, and many a time, on cold nights, when there was not a stick of fire in their room, and the woman abroad—many a time I have had her sleep in our bed with us—my husband will tell monsieur."

The wine-merchant nodded assent. "She speaks the truth, monsieur."

Bulstrode found presence of mind to wonder. "I suppose Mademoiselle Lascaze left debts?"

The husband and wife exchanged glances.

"En vérité, monsieur," confessed Madame Branchard, "she has left a few, but they are small and not significant; a hundred francs will cover them. It is not for our pockets we are come to monsieur."

Here the sentimentality having been disposed of by the woman, the husband broke in:

"It is like this, Monsieur Balstro" (Bulstrode saw how intimately the hôtel meublé knew him): "In a few moments even the authorities will be here to take charge of the woman's effects and Simone will become the property of the State. She has no relatives, as Monsieur will understand. Thinking, therefore, that monsieur, who is so good, might for some reason care to take an interest in the child's future——"

Branchard coughed and paused. Having given Mr. Bulstrode ample time to speak, to show some signs of life and of his usual quick benevolence, and being greeted with nothing other than quiet, meditative silence, the merchant shrugged and comprehensively relinquished suppositions and hopes in one large gesture.

"In which case" (evidently that of taking for granted that Bulstrode was less good than they had supposed), "in that case we shall put in a plea ourselves for Simone and adopt her."

Madame's voice, now in full and customary volume, expressed frankly her goodness. "We have five children and our means are modest, but"—and she put it sublimely—"one is not a mother for nothing."

Her tirade, however, was quite lost on Bulstrode, who was occupied with his own projects of benevolence. Turning to this contingent of the hôtel meublé a back scarcely more imperturbable than his face had been, he went out of the room to the terrace, where Simone sat just as he had left her. She was, on her low chair, so tiny that in order more nearly than ever before to approach her little point of view, to come into her little sphere, Bulstrode knelt down on one knee.

"Don't look so frightened, my child. Nothing will harm you—I assure you of that; don't you"—he called her loyally to answer—"don't you believe me, Simone?"

The little thing drew in a struggling breath and whispered: "Oui, m'sieu."

"Good!" He was smiling at her and had taken her ice-cold, dirty, little hands. "You are fond of me, Simone—you like a little M'sieu Balstro'?"

"Oh," she caught at her frightened voice and more clearly whispered, "oh, oui, m'sieu!"

"Bien encore!"

He wanted tactfully to break the ice which shock and terror had formed around the poor little heart, and yet not to prolong the moment.

"Voyons," he said to her lightly, as if he were only to bid her come and play in his garden, and not ask her to decide her destiny. "Voyons, how would you like to come and live with me? to have toys and pretty clothes and good things to eat—to be"—the bachelor put it bravely—"to be my little girl. How, Simone, would you like it?"

If further startled she was humanized by his warmth, which was melting her; her breast heaved, her lips trembled, and she asked: "Et puis—maman?"

Here Madame Branchard, in whom all feelings were subordinate to curiosity and motherhood, had approached until she stood directly behind the two on the terrace. Tears had sprung to her eyes and she sniffled and wiped them frankly away with her hand.

Bulstrode, singularly relieved by her appearance, turned and asked her, "What does she then know?"

"Nothing, m'sieur, nothing at all."

Simone got up on her feet and her big doll fell with a crash on the marble of the terrace and broke in a dozen pieces, but the catastrophe did not touch her.

"And maman?" she repeated. "Where is she? She did not come home last night?"

Bulstrode had descended to one knee in order to approach her, but Madame Branchard got down on both knees and tenderly put her arms around the child.

"Look, ma petite—your mother has gone away forever to a beautiful country, and she has left you here to be a good girl and do whatever this kind gentleman says. Will you go to be his little girl? He will give you everything in the world." She closed with this magnificent promise, whose breadth and wealth no child-mind could grasp. In order to give her more complete liberty in which to make her decision the wine-merchant's wife, after kissing her, set her free.

Simone made no audible reflection of wonder at her seeming desertion, no exhibition of distress, no melodramatic outburst of grief or surprise. She stood silent, absorbed, desolate, and ashamed, twisting in and out between her frail little fingers the fringe of Madame Branchard's black shawl.

"Or," brightly continued the good woman, "you can come home with me and play with Marie and Jeannette and have what we have. You can be my little girl, as you will—it is for you to decide—chez moi, or with this bon monsieur."

Was it fair of them—thus to lay on her six years the burden of her own destiny?

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.

"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!"

THE FOURTH ADVENTURE

IV

IN WHICH HE MAKES THREE PEOPLE HAPPY

There were times when Bulstrode decided that he never could see the woman he loved any more: there were times when he felt he must follow her to the ends of the world, just in order to assure himself that she was alive and serene. Such is the gentleman's character and point of view, that she must always be serene, no matter what his own troubled emotions might be.

He had the extraordinary idea that he could not himself be happy or make a woman happy over the dishonor of another man. It was old-fashioned and unworldly of Bulstrode: still, that was the way he was constituted.

It was on one of the imperious occasions when he felt as if he must follow her to the ends of the earth, that he steered his craft toward a little town on the edge of the Norman coast, to a very fashionable bit of France—Trouville. As soon as he understood that Mrs. Falconer was to be in Normandy for the race week, he packed his things and ran down and put up at the Hôtel de Paris. On this occasion the gentleman followed so fast that he overleaped his goal, and arrived at the watering-place before the others appeared. Bulstrode took his own rooms, and in response to a telegram, engaged the Falconers' apartments. He liked the way the little salon gave on the heavenly blue sea, and with a nice fancy to make it something more home-like for his friend to begin with, he filled it with flowers ... ran what lengths he dared in putting a few rare vases and several pieces of old Italian damask here and there.

"Falconer," he consoled himself, "will be too taken up with his horses to notice the inside of anything but a stable! And I shall tell the others that the hôtel proprietor is a collector: most of these Norman innkeepers are collectors." And, as his idea grew, he went to greater lengths, with the curiosity shops on either side the Rue de Paris to tempt him. The result was that when Mrs. Falconer came, she found the hôtel room wonderfully mellow and harmonious, and as a woman who revels in beauty she responded to its charm. She was delighted, her eyes sparkled, her cheeks glowed. And Jimmy Bulstrode had a moment of high happiness as she looked at him and touched with her pretty hands the flowers he had himself arranged. It was a delightful moment, a moment that was much to him.

The Falconers arrived with the usual lot of servants and motors and, moreover, with a racing outfit, for Falconer had decided to enter his English filly, Bonjour, for the events of August. There was also with them a Miss Molly Malines and a young sprig of nobility, the Marquis de Presle-Vaulx, to whom Bulstrode was a trifle paternal.

"He can't, at least, be after Molly's millions," he reflected; "he can't, at any rate, be a fortune hunter, for the girl's face is the only fortune she has!"

On a bright and beautiful morning, the first of all the days for many weeks—for Bulstrode reckoned his calendar in broken bits, beginning a New Year each time he saw his lady again—a bright and beautiful morning he walked out at the fashionable hour of noon and turned into the Rue de Paris.

The eyes of many women followed Bulstrode.

Being an early riser, he had already taken a brisk walk over the cliffs, had swum out beyond the buoys, and now in his flannels, his panama, a gay rose in the lapel of his coat, amongst the many debonnaire and pleasing people who filled the little fishing town, his was a distinguished figure. He trusted very much to instinct to discover his friend, and after a few moments found her at the extreme end of the street which the papers of Paris tell you is "the most worldly and fashionable in any part of the Continent, during race week at Trouville." Mary Falconer was of course dressed in the very height of the mode. She looked up and saw Bulstrode before he saw her, but she could wait until he made his leisurely way down to her side. She waited for him a great deal. He did not know how much, but then her point of view and her feelings have never come into the history. It amused her to make him her many clever little bits of speech, for he was so appreciative of everything she said, and looking up at him now as he approached she said: "These people never seem to have anything to do, do they? Leisure is like money: to enjoy thoroughly either money or leisure one should only have a little of each. Now for us good-for-nothings who have no occupation it doesn't make much difference what we do or where we do it!"

The lady's camp-stool had been set down at the end of the street. Those who are not promenading opened little chaises pliantes and watched from their little seats. Mrs. Falconer sat facing the ocean, or what was visible of it between the bathing tents. Pagodas gay with children's shovels and bright pails, striped bonbons and the sea of muslins, ribbons and feathers and sunshades of the midsummer crowd. All the capitals of Europe had poured themselves into Trouville, and the resort overflowed with beauty and fashion.

'"It's perfectly bewitching," Bulstrode said to her, "perfectly bewitching, and it makes one feel as though there were nothing but pleasure in the world."

She wore a white dress and her hat was bright with flowers. She opened her rose-lined parasol over her head.

"Jimmy," she said abruptly, and brought his eyes to hers like a flash, for he had been looking over the scene, "do you know I begin to see where the innkeeper found his rare treasures; there are a great many other things that suggest them in this little street!"

Bulstrode replied, "You don't want him to take them away, do you?"

She shook her head. "No," she said slowly, "they have been a great pleasure, but I don't want to buy them from him, either."

"I don't think he'd sell them," Bulstrode was certain of it, "they're extremely precious in his eyes."

"I'm a good judge of works of art, however," she said after a moment, "that is to say, I know a good thing when I see it. There was a little picture in one of the shops back of me that I would have given a lot to own."

Her friend exclaimed: "Are you going to buy it! That is to say, will Falconer buy it for you?"

"My dear soul—with his horse running to-morrow! At any rate, the bijou is already bought above my head. I went in yesterday to see what was the least they would take for it, and found the Prince Pollona, the Englishman who buys for the Wallace Collection, and somebody who, they tell me, was the Rockefeller of St. Petersburg. Well, my little picture was what they all wanted, and you can imagine that I retired from the running...! But I tell you this," she said, "only to show you how very good my taste is, and so that you may rely on my selections."

Bulstrode smiled in a way that said he thought he might rely on her, but still he asked rather quizzically, "Well, what are you going to recommend to me now?"

The lady at the moment, not having anything in mind, looked suddenly up, gave him whimsically:

"Molly and her Marquis."

The two young people with Jack Falconer were coming slowly along the Rue de Paris toward them. The grace of the girl, her freshness under her wide hat where flowers and ribbons danced and blended; the radiant pleasure she exhaled, the swing of her dress, her youth, expressed so happily the joy of life, recommended themselves easily in a flash....

"Oh, Molly—she's perfect!"

"And the Marquis?"

"He is perfectly in love," ... Bulstrode allowed him so much.

"My dear friend, remember I know my objets d'art."

"Oh, as an objet d'art...!"

Bulstrode took the young man in: his white immaculateness, his boutonnière, his panama—(not less than forty dollars a straw, as Jimmy knew) his monocle.

"As an objet d'art," he further conceded to her, "he's perfect, too!"

"As an homme de race," said the American lady eagerly, with the true Republican appreciation of blood and title, "as an homme du monde, as a..."

"Title?" he finished for her. "Oh, the Presle-Vaulx are all right! I'll grant him a perfect title, sound as a bell, first Crusade—Léonce de Presle-Vaulx main droite, or sur azur—Pour toi seule. It's a good old tradition—a good old name."

She scented his lack of sympathy. "Oh, I'll stand for him, Jimmy. I know the pâte, as they say. I know the ring and the tone; and you must, at my valuation, take him."

"Molly, dear lady, has done the taking." Bulstrode lifted his hat as the trio came up. "And what, after all, can we—the rest of us do?"

"The rest of them" watched the young couple with mingled emotions: Mary Falconer with all the romance in her, and in spite of unusual cool reasonableness she had a feminine share—Jimmy with the sympathy of a kindly nature, a certain sting of jealousy at the decidedly perfect completeness of young love, and with a singularly wide-awake practical common sense for an impulsive gentleman whose pleasure in life is to pour into people's hands the things they most long for and cannot without him ever hope to enjoy!

Bulstrode, although owning his share of horse-flesh and a proper number of automobiles and keeping, for the best part of the time, a yacht out of commission, was a sport only in a certain sense of the word. The people who liked him best and who were themselves able to judge, said he was a "dead game sport," but Jimmy smiled at this and knew that the human element interested him in life above all, and that he only cared for amusements as they helped others to enjoy. He was backing Falconer's horse, although he felt certain the winnings would go to the Rothschild's gelding. On the afternoon, however, when De Presle-Vaulx came up to him in the Casino and said: "On what are you going to put your money, Monsieur?" Bulstrode looked at him thoughtfully. He had stood by the young man the night before at baccarat and seen him lose enough to keep a little family of Trouville fisherfolk for a year.

"Are you going to play the races, Marquis?"

"But naturally!" ...

De Presle-Vaulx had an attractive frankness, and his smile was—Bulstrode understood what a girl would think about it!

"... But of course! One doesn't come to Trouville in la grande semaine not to play!"

He put his hand cordially on Bulstrode's arm.

"Entre nous," he said, "I don't believe Falconer's horse has a chance against Rothschild's Grimace. And you?"

"Oh, I shall back Jack Falconer's mare," the older man replied.

The Marquis played with his moustache. "She doesn't stand a show."

Bulstrode was walking slowly down the grand staircase by his companion's side. "And you will back Grimace?" He ignored the young man's prognostication.

De Presle-Vaulx said ingenuously: "I? Oh, seriously, I'm not betting. I lost at baccarat last night, and I haven't a sou for the race."

He looked boyish and regretful. The American put his hand in his pocket and took out his portefeuille.

"Let me," he suggested pleasantly, "be your banker."

The light dry rustle of French bank-notes came agreeably from between his fingers.

The young man hesitated, then put out his hand.

"A thousand thanks, Monsieur, you are too good—I will back Grimace, and after the race——"

Jimmy handed him the notes to choose from.

At the stair foot stood Molly and Mrs. Falconer.

"We went this afternoon to see Jack's horse," Miss Malines said to the Marquis. Whatever she said, no matter how general, she said to him—others might gather what they could. "Bon Jour's a beauty—a dear, and as fit as possible. Oh, she's in great form! Jack's crazy about her, and so is the jockey. I know Bon Jour will win! I'm going to put twenty-five francs on her to-morrow."

Mary Falconer smiled radiantly. "And you, Jimmy," she took for granted, "are of course betting on the favorite?"

"If you mean Grimace—" his tone was indifferent—"no, I shall back your husband's horse."

"Jimmy!" Her tone changed, and her expression as well.

De Presle-Vaulx saw it, and he knew what women's voices can mean. He was a Frenchman, and he understood what a slow, delicious flush, a darkening of the eyes, a sharp note in the voice can signify of feeling—as well as of gratitude, surprise and a little scorn. There was all this in Mary Falconer's exclamation and her face.

"And Maurice!" Molly said, "of course, you're doing the same?"

The Marquis met his fiancée's clear eyes, her girlish enthusiasm and her confidence. He bit his lip, shrugged, hesitated, looked at Bulstrode, at Molly, and laughed. The presence of the others and the custom of his country made it only a pretty courtesy—he lifted Molly's hand to his lips.

"Of course—chère Mademoiselle, I am backing Bon Jour with all my heart, cela va sans dire!"

Miss Malines regarded her friend with a pretty grimace and a smile.

As they walked along together all four, Bulstrode said to himself:

"He's a sport, a true sport—that's five thousand francs to the bad. He was game, however, he's a good sport and, better yet, he's a true lover!"

Whether or not Mary Falconer really had an exalted idea of the merits of Bon Jour, or whether she thoroughly understood the situation, how was her friend to know?

Falconer adored the horse, and the lady showed in the matter, as in everything else, a fine loyalty to her husband, which was undoubtedly one of the reasons why—but this is going too deeply into the domain of Bulstrode's feelings, which, since he keeps them honorably sealed, it is unworthy to surprise even in the interest of psychology.

Bulstrode saw that his friend was pleased: her color, her mounting spirits at dinner, showed it. She spoke with interest of the races, and with confidence greater than she had hitherto evinced in the fortunes of her husband's racer—indeed she talked horse to Molly's edification, her husband's delight, and Bulstrode's admiration. All this—the sense that the party was, so to speak, with him—put Jack Falconer in the best of spirits, and the unruffled course of the dinner, and, above all, the humor of the elder of the two ladies, quite repaid Jimmy Bulstrode for the sure loss of his stakes.

"Does she really think that I have faith in the horse?" he wondered—-meeting her charming eyes over the glass of champagne she was drinking. They did not answer in text his question, but their glow and the light of content in them answered for him other questions which were perhaps of greater interest.

She was not unhappy. All his life, since his acquaintance with her, it had been his aim, in so far as he could aid it, that she should not be unhappy. His idea of affection was that in all cases it should bring to the object—joy. In his own life these things which brought him, no matter how pleasant they might be, the after taste of regret and misery he strove with all his manliness to tear out: "and surely," he so argued, "if my presence in her life cause her for one moment anything but peace, it would be better that we had never looked into each other's eyes."

There was nothing especially buoyant, in the attitude of the young Marquis! His inclination to feminine will had cost him—he was so familiar with the turf and the next day's programme to feel sure—five thousand francs, which he had not the means to pay.

Later in the evening, very much later, indeed well on to one o'clock, Bulstrode, wandering through the baccarat rooms—for no other purpose, it would be said from his indifferent air, than to study types—saw Maurice de Presle-Vaulx just leaving the Casino.

Bulstrode's air was as friendly and as naïve as though he had not a pretty clear idea of just how the tide of events was fluctuating toward misfortune in the case of this young nobleman.

"What do you say," he suggested, "to getting something to drink or eat? What do you say to a piece of perdreau and some champagne?"

The Frenchman followed the older man, who in contrast to his pallor looked the picture of health and spirits. Bulstrode cheerily led him to a small table in the corner of the restaurant, where they sat opposite one another, and for a little time applied themselves in silence to the light supper served them.

The Marquis drank more than he ate, and Bulstrode dutifully finished the game and toast, quite glad, in truth, to break the fast of a long evening which he had spent in the close rooms: for no other reason than unseen, to befriend—and unasked, to chaperone Molly's lover. Finally, when he felt that the right moment to say something had come, he smiled at the young man, and said frankly:

"Voyons, mon ami, don't you feel that you can talk to me a little more freely than you could possibly to even so kind and charming a friend as Mrs. Falconer? We are not of the same race, perhaps, but then under certain circumstances such distinctions are not important. How do you"—he handled the words as though in presenting them to the young man he was afraid they might prick him—"How do you now stand?—I mean to say, the luck has been rather against you, I'm afraid."

Bulstrode would never be so near forty again, and De Presle-Vaulx was a spoiled child—at all events, all that could be spoiled in him had been taken care of by his mother, and in his own way he had spoiled a large part of what remained. He looked up smartly, for he had been following the pattern of the table-cloth. If the frankness of the other threatened to offend him, as he met the kind eyes of the American he found nothing there that could do otherwise than please him. He shrugged with his national habit, then threw out his hands without making any verbal reply, but his smile and his gesture comprehended so much that Bulstrode intelligently exclaimed:

"Oh, but you don't mean to say——?"

"I have not, monsieur, much to lose," the scion of an old house replied simply. "We have the reputation of being poor; but to-night and last night have quite 'wiped me out,' as you say in America. Je suis ruiné."

Bulstrode lit his cigar. De Presle-Vaulx took from his pocket one of his own cigarettes and puffed at it gently. Bulstrode smoked silently, and thought of the young man without looking at him. He liked him, and did not understand him at all: not at all! He supposed, that with his different traditions, his Puritanism, his New World point of view, he could never understand him, but he would enjoy trying to do so, for aside from the quality of spoiled boy, there was something of the man in De Presle-Vaulx to which the New Englander extremely responded.

His next remark was impersonal:

"Bon Jour, then, you think is not likely——?"

"Mon cher Monsieur! ... She is not even mentioned for place! Even in the event of her winning," De Presle-Vaulx was gloomy, "I should be able to discharge my debt to you and nothing more." Again he looked up quickly. "I shall, of course, be quite able to discharge that; I only mean to say that en somme, I am roulé completément roulé."

"What, then, are you going to do?"

De Presle-Vaulx looked at the end of his cigarette as though he took counsel from it, and said measuredly:

"There is, in my position, but one thing possible for a man to do."

"You mean to say, marry, make a rich marriage?"

The Marquis flashed at him:

"A month ago, yes! that would have been the one way out of my embarrassment: but I am no longer in the market. It is the other alternative."

Bulstrode in no case caring to hear put in words a tragically disagreeable means of solving the problems of debt and love, and having less faith in this extravagant, explosive alternative than in the marriage de convenance, did not urge the Frenchman further. He simply brought out—his quiet eyes fixed on the other:

"And the little girl?—Molly—Miss Malines?——"

He gave him three chances to think of the pretty child, and for the first De Presle-Vaulx's expression changed. He had with a nonchalance submitted to the discussion of his fortune and his fate, but now he distinctly showed dignity.

"Don't, I beg of you, speak of Mademoiselle Malines!" and then he said more gently, "mille pardons, mon cher ami!"

Bulstrode smoked his Garcia meditatively. He had not attempted the solving of other people's questions, had not played the good fairy for a long time. He had the hazy feeling—such as he often experienced just before stepping into the mysterious excitement of doing some good deed, of undergoing the effects of a narcotic which put to sleep reason and practical common-sense, and left alive only a desire to befriend. In this case, determined not again to be the victim of sentimentality, determined for once to unite common sense and common humanity, he forcibly dissipated the haze and said:

"Your family! I have, as you know, understood from Mrs. Falconer, the facts of the case. You must not be formal with me." He smiled delightfully. "I am an American; you know we have all sorts of barbarous privileges. We rush in quite where the older races fear to tread ... and Molly Malines' father is an old friend of mine."

(Mr. Bulstrode did not say what kind of an old friend! or even allow himself to remember the I.O.U.s and loans that his bankers had made to the visionary, good-humored, sanguine, unfortunate stockbroker.)

"Your family—how do they take the idea of your marriage to a poor American?"

De Presle-Vaulx pushed his coffee cup aside, leaned his arms on the table, bent over, and said with more confidence:

"Oh, they are entirely opposed to it. That's one reason, to be quite frank with you, why I have been so reckless."

He added: "My mother has refused her consent, and I can never hope to alter my father's attitude. I have their letters to-day as well as telegrams from Presle-Vaulxoron—they bid me 'come home immediately,' and so far as my people are concerned, their refusal puts an end to the affair!"

There was a mixture of amusement and reproach in Bulstrode's tone—"and you have found nothing better to do than to throw away at baccarat what money you had, and have found no other solution for the future than to...?" he eyed the young man keenly, and a proper severity came into his expression. "Nonsense," he said, and repeated the word with more indulgence: "nonsense, mon ami!"

His reproof was borne:

"We are an old race, M. Bulstrode——"

Bulstrode had heard this allocution before. It gave lee-way to so much; permitted so much; excused so much!

"... I don't need to tell you our traditions, or recall our customs. You of course know them. If I marry without my parents' consent I shall probably, during my mother's lifetime, never see her again, and I am her only son. It means that I sever all relations with my people."

Bulstrode knocked the ash off his cigar and said thoughtfully:

"It's too bad! A choice, if there is one, is always too bad. There should in real things be no choice. As soon as such a contingent arises, it proves that neither thing is really worth while! When a man loves a woman there can be no choice. My dear friend, when a man"—he paused—"loves—there is nothing in the world but the woman."

The Marquis looked at the fine face of the elder man. Years had, with their gentle history, and kindly records, touched Jimmy Bulstrode lightly. Every experience made him better to look at; "like a good picture," Mrs. Falconer had said, "painted by a master, and only growing more splendid." Nothing of the worldliness of the roué marked his expression. His memories were clear and honorable, and the Frenchman experienced a sensation of surprise and also one of enlightenment as he looked at him and responded to his expression. He had never seen any one quite like this man of the world, could not think of his prototype in France.

He repeated:

"Nothing but the woman in the world—? Honor—" Bulstrode quickly added, "and the woman—they are synonymous."

In watching his companion he wondered in how much of a tangle the Frenchman's mind was, and just how deep his feet were sunk in the meshes of conventionality and tradition, and decided: "Oh, is it too much to believe that he could——!"

As if in answer to his thoughts, De Presle-Vaulx spoke in the simplest manner possible:

"J'aime Molly."

Quite surprised at the simplicity, Bulstrode beamed on him and waited.

Then the other added:

"But I can't ask any woman to share poverty and debts, and I have no way of making a living; I'm not bred for it."

"You are not an invalid?"

"On the contrary."

"You can work."

De Presle-Vaulx smiled: "I am afraid not! No De Presle-Vaulx has done a stroke of work in three hundred years."

"It's time, then"—Bulstrode was tart—"that you broke the record. Why don't you?" He said as though suddenly illumined—"make me your banker, draw on me for whatever sum you will, and since you have faith in her and are so well supported by the public opinion—bet on Grimace. I believe, with you, that he is sure to win. You would recoup much of your loss here."

De Presle-Vaulx pushed back his chair and exclaimed: "Monsieur!"

"Oh," shrugged Bulstrode, "a woman's caprice, my dear fellow! A foolish little whim of a girl! You can't be expected to mix sport and flirtation to the tune of two or three thousand dollars."

He smiled deceptively.

The young man laughed bitterly:

"So that is something of what you think of me? for I see you are not serious! It's a folly, of course, a sentimental folly," he met Bulstrode's eyes that silently accused him of a like—"but only a man in love knows what sentimental follies are worth! There is"—the young man was suddenly serious, "a sort of prodigality in love only understood by certain temperaments, certain races: it may be degenerate: I suppose it is, and to push it quite to the last phase, is, of course, cowardly, certainly very weak, and men like you, Monsieur, will deem it so."

"You mean—?" and now Bulstrode's tone urged him to make himself clear.

"I mean," said De Presle-Vaulx firmly, "rather than renounce this woman I adore I will without doubt—(given the tangle in which the whole matter is!...") and he could not for the life of him put his intention into words. He smiled nevertheless unmistakably. Bulstrode leaned across the table and put his hand on the other's arm.

"Then you don't love her well enough not to break her heart? Or well enough to live a commonplace life for her?"

"I don't know how to do it."

"Well," said Bulstrode, "I have run upon quite a good many hard moments, perhaps some, in their way, as difficult as this, and I have never thought of getting out of the muddle. Perhaps it is a question, as you say, of temperament and race. I am inclined also to think, stubbornly, that it is a question of the quality of the love that one has for the woman. You won't think it impertinent of me, my dear friend,"—and his tone was such that no one could have thought it impertinent—"you won't, I am sure, take it amiss if we talk this over to-morrow, and if I try to show you something that means life, instead of what you plan."

"You know you as good as stood for De Presle-Vaulx."

Bulstrode held Mrs. Falconer's parasol, her fan, as well as a gold bag purse full of louis, a handkerchief and his own cane and field-glass. For the lady, standing on a chair the better to see the race-track, was applauding with enthusiasm the result of the first handicap. She had placed a bet on a horse called Plum-Branch "from a feeling of sentiment," as she said, because she had, that day, quite by chance, selected a hat with a decorative plum-branch amongst other garnitures.

"I am standing, certainly, Jimmy," she replied to his remark, "and to the peril of my high heels!— There, I've won! and won't you, like an angel, go and cash my bets?—give me the purse, you might have your hand picked! You can put my winnings in your pocket; they're not so enormous."

During his absence she watched the scene around her with animation. The spotless day, if one might so call it, when the sky and the turf and the whole world looked as though washed clean, and nature, seen in the warm sunlight, seemed to palpitate and flutter in the wind that gently stirred ends of ribbon or tips of plumes, and set the fragrance of the country air astir. Back of the lady the tribune was like a floral display: here and there a corner red as roses, there a mass of lily-white dresses enlivened by pink and blue parasols, and the green pesage stretched between the spectators and the race-track in bands of emerald, whilst across it promenaded or stood in groups those interested in the races. Mrs. Falconer acknowledged a friend here and there, glanced affectionately over to where Molly and the Marquis, seated near, fixed their attention on the race-course, where the winner, flying his blue ribbon, cantered triumphantly around the track.

One of a little group Falconer, the worse for many cocktails, stood by the railing, talking familiarly with his jockey, whilst Bon Jour, blanketed to the eyes, was being led up and down the outside track alongside of her rival, Rothschild's Grimace.

Bulstrode returning, gave his friend a handful of gold, which she put into her purse, and he repeated: "You remember that you stood, as it were, for De Presle-Vaulx?"

"I do," she said, "if you think the race-course is the place to take me to account for anything so serious, I do remember, and I do stand. What is the trouble that he needs me?"

"He needs," Bulstrode was serious, "a good many things, it seems to me, in order to get firmly on the plane where he should be!"

"And that is——?"

"On his feet, my dear friend."

"Well, he is head over heels in love," she nodded, "but when he finally lands I think you will find Maurice perfectly perpendicular."

"He won't," returned the other, "at all events, land in the bosom of his family."

"No?"—she looked away from the race-course and laughed—"you mean to say, Jimmy, has he heard, then?"

"I mean to say that they are quite clear in their minds about his marriage! They seem to have all the firmness that the young man lacks. Tell me," he asked his friend, "just what do you know about the matter? What happened that you so strongly took up his cause with Molly? You have not told me yet."

She relinquished the interests of the moment to those of the sentimental question.

"It seems," she said, lowering her tone, "that they have been secretly engaged for a year. Nothing that an American girl can do would surprise me, but you can imagine that I was overwhelmed at his part in the matter. When Molly joined me in Fontainebleau, De Presle-Vaulx promptly followed, and I naturally obliged her to tell me everything. I was dismayed at the lack of tenue he had shown. I had a plain talk with him. He said that he had first met Molly at some dance or other in the American colony, I don't know where; that he understood that American girls disposed of their own lives; that he loved her and wanted to marry her, and that he was only waiting to gain the consent of his family before writing to her father. He seemed delighted to talk with me and perfectly conventional in his feelings. He further told me that his parents until now knew nothing, that he had not been able to tear himself away from Molly long enough to go down to the country where they were and see them. I forced him to write at once; exacted myself that until he received their answer there should be nothing between Molly and him but the merest distant acquaintance. I did not know that he had heard from the Marquise or his father. You seemed to have suddenly entirely gained his confidence and taken my place." She looked over at the young couple. "Poor Molly!" she exclaimed. "He has not, I should say, told her: she looks so happy and so serene! It's of course only a question of dot, otherwise there could be no possible objection. She is perfectly beautiful, the sweetest creature in the world; and she is a born Marquise!"

Bulstrode interrupted her impatiently:

"It would be more to the purpose if he were a born bread-winner and she were a dairy-maid!"

"Jimmy, how vulgar you are!"

"Very—" he was wonderfully sarcastic for him—"money is a very vulgar thing, my dear friend; it's as vulgar as air and bread and butter. It is like all other clean, decent vulgarity, it can be abused, but it's necessary to life."

Mrs. Falconer opened her eyes wide on this new Bulstrode.

"Why, what has happened to you?"

He made a comprehensive gesture: "Oh, I am always supporting a family!" he said with an amusing attempt at irritability. "I am always supporting a family that is not mine, that does not sit at my hearthstone or at my table. I am always marrying other people to some one else, and dressing other people's children!"

He finished with a laugh: "There, No. 5 is up! Aren't you interested in this race?"

Mrs. Falconer and Bulstrode had walked a little from where the young couple chattered indifferent to everything but each other.

"No; I am only interested in what you are saying. What have you planned to do or thought out for them, Jimmy? What do your rebellious phrases imply? Are you really going to make a home for——?"

Bulstrode said stubbornly. "No! I am going to show him how to make one for himself."

He stopped short where he stood: he had resumed the care of her parasol, her fan, and purse.

Her face, as she took in his exposition of his plan for the regeneration of a decayed nobility, was inscrutable. Instead of exclaiming, she stopped to speak a moment to some people who passed, shook hands with the owner of the favorite, and when they were once again alone said to her friend:

"Isn't it too delightful! the whole scene? I mean to say, how perfectly they do it all. How thoroughly gay it is, how debonnair, graceful, and bien compris. Look at the wonderful color of the pesage, and the life of the whole thing! These Latin most thoroughly understand the art of living. You scarcely ever see a care-worn face in France. Look at Jack now! Did you ever see such anxiety as he represents? If Bon Jour is beaten I don't know what will become of him. What shall I do with him?"

Bulstrode's interest on this subject was tepid.

"Oh, he'll be all right!" he said indifferently. "Take him to the Dublin Horse Fair."

And then as though she had not capriciously left the other topic, Mrs. Falconer asked:

"Just what is your plan for Molly and her Marquis? May I not know?"

And Bulstrode who had never in any way thought out a plan or scheduled a scheme for the wise distribution of the good he intended to do, educated now, so he fondly hoped, by his failures, wiser, he was proud to believe, by several sharp lessons—with no little confidence and something of pride, said to his companion:

"I have a ranch out West, you know; a little property I took for a bad debt once. It has turned out to be a great and good piece of luck. That time I was fortunate—" (his tone, was congratulatory and Mrs. Falconer smiled prettily). "I now need a second overseer again—a man of brains, good temper, and physical endurance, who can keep accounts. Experience isn't at all necessary. There's my Englishman there, my Christmas tramp, you recall; he'll show De Presle-Vaulx his duties. It's a good enough berth for any determined chap who has his way to make and an ideal to work for. I purpose to send this Frenchman out on a salary and to see what stuff he's made of. After a year or two, with good sense and push, he will be in a position to ask any girl to be his wife. I'll raise his salary, and if Molly is the girl I take her for, she will help him there."

"And his family, Jimmy?"

"Damn his family!" risked the aroused Bulstrode.

Mrs. Falconer laughed.

"Really! It is casual of you! but you don't know them and can't! But they can quite spoil the whole thing as far as Molly is concerned. His tradition and race, his home and all it means to him—why you can't roughly run against all the old conventions like that, my dear man!"

"Well," said the ruthless gentleman, "then he can go and feed on their charity, can take to his flesh-pots and give up the girl. She is far too good for any foreign fortune-hunter anyway. You spoil a man, all of you. You'd prefer a disreputable roué to a cowboy with money in his pocket and a heart."

"Would it then prove to you De Presle-Vaulx's heart if he threw over his family and went West?"

"Yes," said the other quickly. "It would prove he loves the girl."

"You forget his mother."

Bulstrode fumed.

"I have not the honor to forget her; I don't know the Marquise de Presle-Vaulx."

"I do," interrupted his friend. "She is a charming, gentle old dear; narrow, if you call it so, clear-headed and delightful. She adores her only son, and thinks quite properly that his name, his estates, beautiful if mortgaged, are a fair exchange for an American dot. Maurice de Presle-Vaulx, after all, does not go poverty-stricken to the woman he marries. There are not so many ways to live after one is twenty-five, and to uproot this scion of an old race, to exact such a sacrifice——"

"It would make a man of him."

"He is one already. There are all kinds, I need not tell you so."

"He is head over heels in debt."

Mrs. Falconer laughed again.

"We make him out an acrobat between us."

"He gambles on borrowed money."

"You mean that you have forced him to borrow from you? He will pay what he owes, I am sure of him."

Bulstrode wheeled and scrutinized her, and said with the natural asperity of a man who is bored by a woman's too generous championship of another man:

"You stand for him warmly."

Mrs. Falconer, reading him, said quickly:

"Oh, I know him thoroughly! He has the faults of his race, but as an individual he is the right sort."

With their pretty habit, her cheeks had grown red in the course of the discussion.

"Please give me my parasol; it's awfully hot here."

He opened it for her and she held its rosy lining against the sun.

Mr. Falconer, who from the rail had been observing, through the haze formed by countless cocktails, the figure of his wife in her white dress, as well as the figure of her faithful squire, here came swaggering up to them both. He was never jealous, but Mr. Bulstrode's uniform courtesy and attention to the woman neglected by her husband often piqued him to attention. As he drew near, Mrs. Falconer asked quickly:

"And the Marquis, Jimmy? What do you suppose he will say to your Wild West scheme?"

Bulstrode smiled.

"Oh, you women understand us even when we are stupid mysteries to ourselves! Tell me, how will he take this?"

"He will refuse." The lady was quick in her decision. "He cannot in consistence do otherwise. He will consider your plan provincial and Yankee, and he will consider, what you ignore, that it will kill his mother. If he cannot marry Molly with the family consent in proper French fashion he will naturally give her up. But first of all, my dear Jimmy, he will put you in your place!"

Bulstrode cast a fatherly glance to where the young people sat talking together: the Marquis in gray clothes of the latest London make, a white rose in his button-hole, and monocle in his eye, a figure more unlike the traditional cowboy one could scarcely conceive.

"Your taste is good, ma chere amie," his voice was delighted. "Your instinct as a connoisseur is faultless; but you are not quite sure of your objet d'art this time." He nodded kindly at the Parisian—"He's all right! he's a true sport, a lover and a man. De Presle-Vaulx knows my Wild West scheme and has accepted."

Molly had put twenty-five francs on Bon Jour and expected to win it. The money Bulstrode played would have bought a very handsome present for his lady, and he felt as if he were making an anonymous gift to the woman he loved.

At the ringing of the bell Falconer left his post by the railing and came up and joined the little group of his friends just below the Grand Stand. He lit a cigar, threw down the match furiously, smoked furiously, and nerved himself for the strain.

Nodding toward the betting contingent he muttered: "They're sheep. They're all betting on the favorite naturally. Bon Jour wasn't mentioned for place even, poor little girl!"

The ignored little racer had ambled around the field, her jockey in crimson and white, doubled up upon her back after the manner of his profession. Bon Jour was as golden red as a young chestnut; she had four white feet that twinkled on the fragrant turf whose odors of crushed blades and green blades, of earth and the distant smell of the sea went to her pretty head. She threw it up eagerly as her disputants filled the field. There were nine horses scheduled, but only five qualified. The Rothschild gelding, an English gray, and two others named for probable places.

"She's cool as a rose," murmured Bon Jour's owner, "and just look at her form, will you!"

It was charming, and already the American's horse was attracting attention.

Molly, with De Presle-Vaulx's aid, rose on her chair, from which her excitement threatened at any moment to precipitate her.

"Oh, Maurice—of course she'll win. Isn't she a dear? How much shall I make on twenty-five francs?"

Bulstrode smiled.

"A frightful amount! There are twenty to one up on her, Molly."

The girl mentally calculated, exclaimed with pleasure and, with sparkling eyes, watched the lining-up of the racers. Neck to neck they stood, a splendid showing of satin and shine from fetlock to forelock, equine beauty enough to gladden a sporting man's heart, and all five were away before Miss Malines was even sure which one was the great Grimace.

From the first the favorite's nose was to the good. His shapely body followed, and when the horses came in sight again beyond the right-hand hedge, he had put four lengths between himself and the others. The winner of the Grand Prix had all the field with him. But the gray gelding who strained at Grimace's flanks had no staying powers, although he was backed as strongly for place as was Grimace to win; as he fell back Bon Jour began to attract notice.

Bulstrode and De Presle-Vaulx exchanged glances over the absorbed figure of Jack Falconer. "She may yet win place," murmured the younger man.

As they came up the wide turf sweep that lay like an emerald sea crested by the dark waves of the hedges, as the horses rocked like ships over the obstacle—Bon Jour closely followed the favorite.

At the moment Miss Malines cried: "Oh, a jockey's off! Oh, Jack, it's Bon Jour! She's thrown her jockey! I see the red and white."

But Falconer biting his cigar fiercely, laughed in scorn. "She's thrown them all right. She's left them all behind her—see!" he pointed, "there are only three running." And, indeed, as they came again in sight, one of the horses was seen to be wandering loose about the course, and another cantered nonchalantly some hundred yards behind.

"She's not even trying," murmured her enchanted owner. "She's cool as a rose."

The cries which had named the Rothschild gelding from the start were now mingled, and Bon Jour, flying around the emerald course, might have heard her name for the first on the public lips. She was running gracefully, her head even with the favorite's saddle and the English gray was a far-off third. Bon Jour was pressing to fame.

At the last hurdle as they appeared flying in full sight of the Grand Stand it was evident the pretty creature had made her better good. The horses leapt simultaneously and came down on all fours, with Grimace to the rear, and amongst the frantic acclamation with which the public is always ready to greet the surprise of unlooked-for merit, Bon Jour passed Grimace by half a metre at the goal. Jack Falconer was an interesting figure on the turf; his horse was worth twenty thousand pounds.

Several hours later, Bulstrode, early in the salon, walked up and down waiting the arrival of the ladies. He had paid downstairs a hundred francs for the privilege of dining in the window of the restaurant, because Mrs. Falconer chanced to remark that one saw the room better from that point. And the head waiter even after this monstrous tip said if "ces dames" were late there would be no possibility to keep this gilt-edged table for them. It was the night of the year at Trouville: Boldi and his Hungarians played to five hundred people in the dining-room.

Bulstrode looked at the clock; they had yet ten minutes' grace.

Extremely satisfied with himself, with Bon Jour, above all with the French Marquis—he felt a glow of affection for the whole French nation.

"How we misjudge them!" he mused; "how we accuse them of clinging to their families' apron strings, of being bad colonists; call them hearthstone huggers, degenerates; and declare that they lack nerve and force to rescue themselves from degeneration! And here without hesitation this young man——" At this moment the salon door opened, and one of the ladies he had been expecting came in, the youngest one, Miss Molly Malines, in a tulle dress, an enormous white hat, a light scarf over her shoulders, and the remains of recent tears on her face.

"Oh, Mr. Bulstrode!" she exclaimed, half putting out her hand and drawing it back again, as she bit her lips: "I thought I should find Mary here; I wanted to see her first to cry with! but of course it is you I should see and not cry with!"

She gave a little gasp and put her handkerchief to her eyes to his consternation; then to his relief controlled herself.

"Maurice has just told me everything," she repeated the word with much the same desperation that De Presle-Vaulx had put into a gesture which to Bulstrode had signified ruin.

"He's too wonderful! too glorious, Mr. Bulstrode, isn't he? I loved him before, but I adore him now! He's glorious. I never heard anything so terrible and so silly!"

Bright tears sprang to brighter eyes, and she dashed them away.

("She's adorable") he was obliged to acknowledge it.

"Why, how could you be so cruel; yes, I will say it, so cruel, so hard, so brutal?"

"Brutal?"—he fairly whispered the word in his surprise.

"Why, fancy Maurice in the West, in the dreadful Western life, in that climate——!"

"Why, it is the Garden of Eden," murmured Bulstrode.

"Oh, I mean to say with cattle and cowboys."

"Come," interrupted her father's friend, practically, "you don't know what you are talking about, Molly. You don't talk like an American girl. They've spoiled De Presle-Vaulx, and this will make a man of him!"

Miss Malines called out in scorn:

"A man of him! What do you think he is? He's the finest man I ever saw. You don't know him. Just because he has a title and his mother spoils him, and because he has been a little reckless in debts and things, you throw him over as you do all the French race without knowing them!"

Her tears had dried and her cheeks flamed.

The amiable shopman pressed various toys on monsieur and madame "pour les enfants"

The SentimentalAdventures ofJimmy Bulstrode

BY

MARIE VAN VORST

With Illustrations byALONZO KIMBALL

NEW YORKHURST & COMPANYPUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1908, BYCHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONSPublished March, 1908

TO THE MEMORYOFH. E. TESCHEMACHER

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

From drawings by ALONZO KIMBALL

[ The amiable shopman pressed various toys on monsieur and madame"pour les enfants" . . . . . . Frontispiece ]

[ "I only like him like a kind, kind friend" ]

[ In the midst of this rabble little Simone was dancing ]

[ "I've had a telegram from my husband" ]

THE FIRST ADVENTURE

I

IN WHICH HE BUYS A CHRISTMAS TREE

THE SECOND ADVENTURE

II

IN WHICH HE TRIES TO BUY A PORTRAIT

"I only like him like a kind, kind friend"

THE THIRD ADVENTURE

III

IN WHICH HE FINDS THERE ARE SOME THINGS WHICH ONE CANNOT BUY

In the midst of this rabble little Simone was dancing

THE FOURTH ADVENTURE

IV

IN WHICH HE MAKES THREE PEOPLE HAPPY

The Sentimental
Adventures of
Jimmy Bulstrode

With Illustrations by
ALONZO KIMBALL

NEW YORK
HURST & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published March, 1908

TO THE MEMORY
OF
H. E. TESCHEMACHER

[ The amiable shopman pressed various toys on monsieur and madame
"pour les enfants" . . . . . . Frontispiece ]