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