of the fantastic. Winifred's entry was as that of a warder.
He sprang up laughing.

"Winnie," he said, "I think I am going to South Africa."

"You!" she said in surprise.

"Yes; to give acrobatic performances in the street, and so pave the way
to a position as a millionaire. Who ever heard of a man rising from a
respectable competence to a fortune? According to the papers, you must
start with nothing; that is the first rule of the game. We have ten
thousand a year, so we can never hope to be rich. Fortune only favours
the pauper. I am mad about money to-day. I can think of nothing else."

And he began showing her conjuring tricks with sovereigns which he drew
from his pockets.

She did not tell him that day. And when she told him, it was without
apparent emotion. She seemed merely stating coldly a physical fact,
not breathing out a beautiful secret of her soul and his, a consecrated
wonder to shake them both, and bind them together as two flowers are
bound in the centre of a bouquet, the envy of the other flowers.

"Eustace," she said, and her eyes were clear and her hands were still,
"I think I ought to tell you--we shall have a child."

Her voice was unwavering as a doctor's which pronounces, "You have the
influenza." She stood there before him.

"Winifred!" he cried, looking up. His impulse was to say, "Wife! My
Winifred!" to take her in his arms as any clerk might take his little
middle-class spouse, to kiss her lips, and, in doing it, fancy he drew
near to the prison in which every soul eternally dwells on earth. Finely
human he felt, as the dullest, the most unknown, the plainest, the
most despised, may feel, thank God! "Winifred!" he cried. And then he
stopped, with the shooting thought, "Even now I must be what she thinks
me, what she perhaps loves me for."

She stood there silently waiting.

"Toys!" he exclaimed. "Toys have always been my besetting sin. Now I
will make a grand collection, not for the Pope, as people pretend, but
for our family. You will have two children to laugh at, Winnie. Your
husband is one, you know." He sprang up. "I'll go into the Strand," he
said. "There's a man near the Temple who has always got some delightful
novelty displaying its paces on the pavement. What fun!"

And off he went, leaving Winifred alone with the mystery of her woman's
world, the mystic mystery of birth that may dawn out of hate as out of
love, out of drunken dissipation as out of purity's sweet climax.