The death of the child meant more to Winifred than she would at first acknowledge even to herself. Almost unconsciously she had looked forward to its birth as to a release from bondage. There are moments when a duet is gaol, a trio comparative liberty. The child, the tiny intruder into youthful married life, may come in the guise of an imp or of a good fairy: one to cloud the perfect and complete joy of two, or one to give sunlight to their nascent weariness and dissatisfaction. Or, again, it may be looked for with longing by one of two lovers, with apprehension by the other. Only when it lay dead did Winifred understand that Eustace was to her a stranger, and that she was lonely alone with him. The “Au revoir” of two bodies may be sweet, but the “Au revoir” of two minds is generally but a hypocritical or sarcastic rendering of the tragic word “Adieu.” Winifred’s mind cried “Au revoir” to the mind of Eustace, to his nature, to his love, but deep in her soul trembled the minor music, the shuddering discord, of “Adieu.” Adieu to the body of child; adieu more complete, more eternal, to the soul of husband. Which good bye was the stranger? She stood as at cross-roads, and watched, with hand-shaded eyes, the tiny, wayward babe dwindling on its journey to heaven; the man she had married dwindling on his journey—whither? And the one she had a full hope of meeting again, but the other——

After the funeral the Lanes took up once more the old dual life which had been momentarily interrupted. Had it not been for the interruption, Winifred fancied that she might not have awakened to the full knowledge of her own feelings towards Eustace until a much later period. But the baby’s birth, existence, passing away, were a blow upon the gate of life from the vague without. She had opened the gate, caught a glimpse of the shadowy land of the possible. And to do that is often to realize in a flash the impossibility of one’s individual fate. So many of us manage to live ignorantly all our days and to call ourselves happy. Winifred could never live quite ignorantly again.

To Eustace the interruption meant much less. So long as he had Winifred he could not feel that any of his dreams hung altogether in tatters. Sometimes, it is true, he contemplated the penny toys, and had a moment of quaint, not unpleasant regret, half forming the thought, Why do we ever trouble ourselves to prepare happiness for others, when happiness is a word of a thousand meanings? As often as not, to do so is to set a dinner of many courses and many wines before an unknown guest, who proves to be vegetarian and teetotaler, after all.

“What shall I do with the toys?” he asked Winifred one day.

“The toys? Oh, give them to a children’s hospital,” she said, and her voice had a harsh note in it.

“No,” he answered, after a moment’s reflection; “I’ll keep them and play with them myself; you know I love toys.”

And on the following Sunday, when many callers came to Deanery Street, they found him in the drawing-room, playing with a Noah’s ark. Red, green, violet, and azure elephants, antelopes, zebras, and pigs processed along the carpet, guided by an orange-coloured Noah in a purple top-hat, and a perfect parterre of sons and wives. The fixed anxiety of their painted faces suggested that they were in apprehension of the flood, but their rigid attitudes implied trust in the Unseen.

Winifred’s face that day seemed changed to those who knew her best. To one man, a soldier who had admired her greatly before her marriage, and\who had seen no reason to change his opinion of her since, she was more cordial than usual, and he went away curiously meditating on the mystery of women.

“What has happened to Mrs. Lane?” he thought to himself as he walked down Park Lane. “That last look of hers at me, when I was by the door, going, was—yes, I’ll swear it—Regent Street. And yet Winnie Lane is the purest—I’m hanged if I can make out women! Anyhow, I’ll go there again. People say she and that fantastic ass she’s married are devoted. H’m!” He went to Pall Mall, and sat staring at nothing in his Club till seven, deep in the mystery of the female sex.

And he went again to Deanery Street to see whether the vision of Regent Street was deceptive, and came away wondering and hoping. From this time the vagaries of Eustace Lane became more incessant, more flamboyant, than ever, and Mrs. Lane was perpetually in society. If it would not have been true to say, conventionally, that no party was complete without her, yet it certainly seemed, from this time, that she was incomplete without a party. She was the starving wolf after the sledge in which sat the gay world. If the sledge escaped her, she was left to face darkness, snow, wintry winds, loneliness. In London do we not often hear the dismal howling of the wolves, suggesting steppes of the heart frigid as Siberia?

Eustace grew uneasy, for Winifred seemed eluding him in this maze of entertainments. He could not impress the personality of his mask upon her vitally when she moved perpetually in the pantomime processions of society, surrounded by grotesques, mimes, dancers, and deformities.

“We are scarcely ever alone, Winnie,” he said to her one day.

“You must learn to love me in a crowd,” she answered. “Human nature can love even God in isolation, but the man who can love God in the world is the true Christian.”

“I can love you anywhere,” he said. “But you———” And then he stopped and quickly readjusted his mask which was slipping off.

From that day he monotonously accentuated his absurdities. All London rang with them. He was the Court Fool of Mayfair, the buffoon of the inner circles of the Metropolis, and, by degrees, his painted fame, jangling the bells in its cap, spun about England in a dervish dance, till Peckham whispered of him, and even the remotest suburbs crowned him with parsley and hung upon his doings. All the blooming flowers of notoriety were his, to hug in his arms as he stood upon his platform bowing to the general applause. His shrine in Vanity Fair was surely being prepared. But he scarcely thought of this, being that ordinary, ridiculous, middle-class thing, an immoderately loving husband, insane enough to worship romantically the woman to whom he was unromantically tied by the law of his country. With each new fantasy he hoped to win back that which he had lost. Each joke was the throw of a desperate gamester, each tricky invention a stake placed on the number that would never turn up. That wild time of his career was humorous to the world, how tragic to himself we can only wonder. He spread wings like a bird, flew hither and thither as if a vagrant for pure joy and the pleasure of movement, darted and poised, circled and sailed, but all the time his heart cried aloud for a nest and Winifred. Yet he wooed her only silently by his follies, and set her each day farther and farther from him.

And she—how she hated his notoriety, and was sick with weariness when voices told her of his escapades, modulating themselves to wondering praise. Long ago she had known that Eustace sinned against his own nature, but she had never loved him quite enough to discover what that nature really was. And now she had no desire to find out. He was only her husband and the least of all men to her.

The Lanes sat at breakfast one morning and took up their letters. Winifred sipped her tea, and opened one or two carelessly. They were invitations. Then she tore, the envelope of a third, and, as she read it, forgot to sip her tea. Presently she laid it down slowly. Eustace was looking at her.

“Winifred,” he said, “I have got a letter from the editor of Vanity Fair.”

“Oh!”

“He wishes me to permit a caricature of myself to appear in his pages.”

Winifred’s fingers closed sharply on the letter she had just been reading. A decision of hers in regard to the writer of it was hanging in the balance, though Eustace did not know it.

“Well?” said Eustace, inquiring of her silence.

“What are you going to reply?” she asked.

“I am wondering.”

She chipped an eggshell and took a bit of dry toast.

“All those who appear in Vanity Fair are celebrated, aren’t they?” she said.

“I suppose so,” Eustace said.

“For many different things.”

“Of course.”

“Can you refuse the editor’s request?”

“I don’t know why I should.”

“Exactly. Tell me when you have written to him, and what you have written, Eustace.”

“Yes, Winnie, I will.”

Later on in the day he came up to her boudoir, and said to her:

“I have told him I am quite willing to have my caricature in his paper.”

“Your portrait,” she said. “All right. Leave me now, Eustace; I have some writing to do.”

As soon as he had gone she sat down and wrote a short letter, which she posted herself.

A month later Eustace came bounding up the stairs to find her.

“Winnie, Winnie!” he called. “Where are you? I’ve something to show you.”

He held a newspaper in his hand. Winifred was not in the room. Eustace rang the bell.

“Where is Mrs. Lane?” he asked of the footman who answered it.

“Gone out, sir,” the man answered.

“And not back yet? It’s very late,” said Eustace, looking at his watch.

The time was a quarter to eight. They were dining at half-past.

“I wonder where she is,” he thought.

Then he sat down and gazed at a cartoon which represented a thin man with a preternaturally pale face, legs like sticks, and drooping hands full of toys—himself. Beneath it was written, “His aim is to amuse.”

He turned a page, and read, for the third or fourth time, the following:

“Mr. Eustace Lane.

“Mr. Eustace Bernhard Lane, only son of Mr. Merton Lane, of Carlton House Terrace, was born in London twenty-eight years ago. He is married to one of the belles of the day, and is probably the most envied husband in town.

“Although he is such a noted figure in society, Mr. Eustace Lane has never done any conspicuously good or bad deed. He has neither invented a bicycle nor written a novel, neither lost a seat in Parliament, nor found a mine in South Africa. Careless of elevating the world, he has been content to entertain it, to make it laugh, or to make it wonder. His aim is to amuse, and his whole-souled endeavour to succeed in this ambition has gained him the entire respect of the frivolous. What more could man desire?”

As he finished there came a ring at the hall-door bell.

“Winifred!” he exclaimed, and jumped up with the paper in his hand.

In a moment the footman entered with a note.

“A boy messenger has just brought this, sir,” he said.

Eustace took it, and, as the man went out and shut the door, opened it, and read:

Eustace sank down in a chair.

On the table at his elbow lay Vanity Fair. Mechanically he looked at it, and read once more the words beneath his picture, “His aim is to amuse.”