t the safety of many of us lie merely in dressing up? Do we not
buy our fate at the costumier's?

"Just tell me one thing," Winifred went on. "Are you natural?"

"Natural?" he hesitated.

"Yes; I think you must be. You've got a whimsical nature."

"I suppose so." He thought of his journey with his father years ago,
and added: "I wish I hadn't."

"Why? There is a charm in the fantastic, although comparatively few
people see it. Life must be a sort of Arabian Nights Entertainment to
you."

"Sometimes. To-night it is different. It seems a sort of Longfellow
life."

"What's that?"

"Real and earnest."

And then he proposed to her, with a laugh, to shoot an arrow at the dead
poet and his own secret psalm.

And Winifred accepted him, partly because she thought him really
strange, partly because he seemed so pretty in his wig, which she chose
to believe his own hair.

They were married, and on the wedding-day the bridegroom astonished his
guests by making a burlesque speech at the reception.

In anyone else such an exhibition would have been considered the worst
taste, but nobody was disgusted, and many were delighted. They had begun
to fear that Eustace was getting humdrum. This harlequinade after
the pantomime at the church--for what is a modern smart wedding but a
second-rate pantomime?--put them into a good humour, and made them feel
that, after all, they had got something for their presents. And so the
happy pair passed through a dreary rain of rice to the mysteries of that
Bluebeard's Chamber, the honeymoon.

II.

Winifred anticipated this honeymoon with calmness, but Eustace was too
much in love to be calm. He was, on the contrary, in a high state of
excitement, and of emotion, and the effort of making his ridiculous
speech had nearly sent him into hysterics. But he had now fully resolved
to continue in his whimsical course, and to play for ever the part of a
highly erratic genius, driven hither and thither by the weird impulses
of the moment. That he never had any impulses but such as were common to
most ordinary young men was a sad fact which he meant to most carefully
conceal from Winifred. He had made up his mind that she believed his
mask to be his face. She had, therefore, married the mask. To divorce
her violently from it might be fatal to their happiness. If he showed
the countenance God had given him, she might cry: "I don't know you.
You are a stranger. You are like all the other men I