"Who is there," his companion gave him the question in a challenging tone "to tell each other and every one of us what is or will be a mistake in his life? Where were everyone's eyes when I married?--Why didn't someone tell me then that my marriage was a hideous mistake? As for the rest of it..." she turned away for a second towards the window, and Bulstrode saw how the hot blood had mounted and her eyes had changed when after a moment she came back to him again. She put out towards him a beseeching hand: "_You_ above all men, who are faithful to an ideal, must not give me old platitudes!" Bulstrode's head reeled. He felt like a man who after a narcotic finds his brain suddenly alight and real things grow strange. He wanted to rub his eyes. She appeared singularly to appreciate his daze. "It is as strange to me as it is to you, to find myself here with a man to whom I have never spoken before--to be under his protection, and to talk with him like this; and yet I have seen you so often, I have watched you in the distance, and long since I singled you out as the one man in whom I could fancy confiding--the one man to whom I could give a sacred trust." With these words the incognita drew herself up, and her manner, with amazing swiftness, changed from a childlike confidence to a dignity not without a certain rigidness, and as Bulstrode remarked this, he also noticed that she was very young, and he was conscious in her of a something he had never quite met in a woman before--an extreme dignity, an ultra poise, an assurance.--Who was she?--And whom did she take him to be? With every turn of the fast wheels of the express it was growing more difficult to explain. She would more keenly feel the fact that he had not cut her frankness short--he had no right to her confidences even though she took their mutual knowledge of each other for granted. "When," he ventured it delicately--"did you last see me?" It was bold, but it did perfectly. "Oh, an age ago, isn't it? You were last on the Continent I think in August at Trouville, during La Grande Semaine." Ah, he reflected, _of course_! _That_ was where, amongst so many other celebrities and beauties, she had attracted his attention. But his rapid mental calculations of those seven days could reveal to him no woman's face but one. He found himself even in this unique moment recalling the time following hard on Molly's formal engagement to her Marquis ... and those days were amongst the brightest in his life. No, there had been no foreign element at Trouville for him in the dazzle and freedom of that worldly fortnight--for Jimmy Bulstrode, in all the scene she summoned up, there was but one woman. He came back with a start to the other. "Then yesterday, as you passed our table at the Carlton, and it seemed as if heaven had sent you to us to help us--at least so we both felt."