"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?"