"Unkind?" he repeated vaguely. "But why should you think that? Please me?"--and his graciousness did not fall short of her own--"But why should you...?" "Oh, true," she interrupted him, "quite true. There is no reason why--" and she made a rather petulant gesture--"yet every woman wants to please, and none of us relishes being judged. Never mind, however, don't think of me as a _person_--just let me talk to you frankly, be myself for once with someone if I can." Jimmy Bulstrode gathered himself together and sat back in his corner. She was very lovely at it, this being herself. Gallantry would not let him bluntly tell her that she had made a mistake. A second more would clear the matter and would be quite soon enough, for him at least, to find that they were total strangers. Unless, indeed, he had met her and forgotten it. They had possibly held some conversation together in a London drawing-room. But how could he have been such a boor as to forget her? She was neither a crook nor a mad woman--she might be an adventuress; if so, she was an unusual one. He glanced at her luggage as if it might help him--a dark-covered dressing-case, bundle of furs, and rugs--new, everything new. Her left hand was bare of rings, she clasped it with her gloved fellow and said warmly: "I can't believe it possible that you came, actually came, and that we have so smoothly met! I can't believe nothing has hitched or missed, or that everything is so cleverly planned and arranged for me, and least of all I can believe that it should be _you_ who are so sublimely doing this." "Ah--" But here Bulstrode tardily started up. _He_ doing it all? At least if he was, then he must, if nothing else--know! He smiled at her with a pleasant sense of being in the secret and with indulgent amusement at her mistake. "I think--you made a mistake," he began it with commonplaceness, but his gesture softened the words. But the lady made a little annoyed "tchk" with her tongue against her teeth, and threw up her head with an impatient toss, an intensely foreign way of dismissing his interpolation. "Don't, in pity's sake, talk like this," she exclaimed. "_Mistake_? Who under the blue heavens _doesn't_ make them--Certa! Haven't you, yourself, in spite of your moral, spotless life, haven't even _you_ made them?" "How," flushed the naïve gentleman, on the sudden betrayed into a mental frankness of self-approval near to conceit, "how does _she_ know me so well?"