"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."