ld kill our feelings," he said. "They make us absurd. Life
should be a breathing calm, as death is a breathless calm."

The calm descending upon Winifred was of the benumbing order.

Later he recoiled from this coquetting with the destroyer.

"After all," he said, "which of us does not feel himself eternal, exempt
from the penalty of the race? You don't believe that you will ever die,
Winifred?"

"I know it," she said.

"Yes, but you don't believe it."

"You think knowledge less real than belief? Perhaps it is. But I, at
least, hope that some day I shall die. To live on here for ever would be
like staying eternally at a party. After all, when one has danced, and
supped, and flirted, and wondered at the gowns, and praised the flowers,
and touched the hand of one's hostess, and swung round in a final
gallop, and said how much one has enjoyed it all--one wants to go home."

"Does one?" Eustace said. "Home you call it!"

He shuddered.

"I call it what I want it to be, what I think it may be, what the poor
and the weary and the fallen make it in their lonely thoughts. Let us,
at least, hope that we travel towards the east, where the sun is."

"You have strange fancies," he said.

"I! Not so strange as yours."

She looked at him in the eyes as she spoke. He wondered what that look
meant. It seemed to him a menace.

"I must keep it up--I must keep it up," he murmured to himself as he
left the room. "Winifred loves fancies--loves me for what she thinks
mine."

He went to his library, and sat down heavily, to devise fresh outrages
on the ordinary.

His pranks became innumerable, and Society called him the most original
figure of London. The papers quoted him--his doings, not his sayings.
People pointed him out in the Park. His celebrity waxed. Even the
Marble Arch seemed turning to gaze after him as he went by, showing the
observation which the imaginative think into inanimate things.

At least, so a wag declared.

And Winifred bore it, but with an increasing impatience.

At this time, too, a strange need of protection crept over her, the
yearning for man's beautiful, dog-like sympathy that watches woman in
her grand dark hour before she blooms into motherhood. When she knew the
truth, she resolved to tell Eustace, and she came into his room softly,
with shining eyes. He was sitting reading the Financial News in a nimbus
of cigarette smoke, secretly glorying in his momentary immunity from the
prison rules