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 a