didn't choose to
marry." His blood ran cold at the thought. No, he must keep it up. She
loved his fantasies because she believed them natural to him. She must
never suspect that they were not natural. So, as they travelled, he
planned the campaign of married life, as doubtless others, strange in
their new bondage, have planned. He gazed at Winifred, and thought,
"What is her notion of the ideal husband, I wonder?" She gazed at him,
and mused on his affection and his whimsicality, and what the two would
lead to in connection with her fate. And the old, scarlet-faced guard
smiled fatuously at them both through the window on which glared a
prominent "Engaged" as he had smiled on many another pair of fools--so
he silently dubbed them. Then they entered Bluebeard's Chamber and
closed the door behind them.

Brighton was their destination. They meant to lose themselves in a
marine crowd.

They stayed there for a fortnight, and then returned to town, Eustace
more in love than ever.

But Winifred?

One afternoon she sat in the drawing-room of the pretty little house
they had taken in Deanery Street, Park Lane. She was thinking, very
definitely. The silent processes of even an ordinary woman's mind--what
great male writer would not give two years of his life to sit with them
and watch them, as the poet watches the flight of a swallow, or the
astronomer the processions of the sky? A curious gale was raging through
the town, touzling its thatch of chimney-pots, doing violence to
the demureness of its respectable streets. Night was falling, and in
Piccadilly those strange, gay hats that greet the darkness were coming
out like eager, vulgar comets in a dim and muttering firmament. It was
just the moment when the outside mood of the huge city begins to undergo
a change, to glide from its comparative simplicity of afternoon into
its leering complexity of evening. Each twenty-four hours London has its
moment of emancipation, its moment in which the wicked begin to breathe
and the good to wonder, when "How?" and "Why?" are on the lips of the
opposing factions, and only the philosophers who know--or think they
know--their human nature hold themselves still, and feel that man is at
the least ceaselessly interesting.

Winifred sat by the fire and held a council. She called her thoughts
together and gave audience to her suspicions, and her brown eyes were
wide and rather mournful as her counsellors uttered each a word of hope
or of w