t she felt sad, such a foolish sorrow, as a gaoler may feel
sad who has grown to love his prisoner, and sees him smile when the
gaping door gives him again to crime.

"It's gone," she said to Eustace; "I think it's glad to go."

"Glad--a kite!" he said.

And it struck her that he would have thought it equally sensible if she
had spoken, like Hans Andersen, of the tragedies of a toy-shop or the
Homeric passions of wooden dolls.

Then, why had he been prompted by the wind to play the boy if he had
none of the boy's ardent imagination?

They reached Deanery Street, and passed in from the night and the
elements. Eustace shut the door with a sigh of relief. Winifred's
echoing sigh was of regret.

It seemed a listless world--the world inside a lighted London house,
dominated by a pale butler with black side-whiskers and endless
discretion. But Eustace did not feel it so. Winifred knew that beyond
hope of doubt as she stole a glance at his face. He had put off the
child--the buffoon--and looked for the moment a grave, dull young man,
naturally at ease with all the conventions. She could not help saying
to herself, as she went to her room to live with hairpins and her
lady's-maid: "I believe he hated it all!"

From that night of kite-flying Winifred felt differently towards her
husband. She was of the comparatively rare women who hate pretence even
in another woman, but especially in a man. The really eccentric she
was not afraid of--could even love, being a searcher after the new
and strange, like so many modern pilgrims. But pinchbeck
eccentricity--Brummagem originalities--gave to her views of the poverty
of poor human nature leading her to a depression not un-tinged with
contempt.

And the fantasies of Eustace became more violent and more continuous
as he began to note the lassitude which gradually crept into her
intercourse with him. London rang with them. At one time he pretended to
a strange passion for death; prayed to a skull which grinned in a shrine
raised for it in his dressing-room; lay down each day in a coffin, and
asked Winifred to close it and scatter earth upon the lid, that he might
realize the end towards which we journey. He talked of silence, long
and loudly--an irony which Winifred duly noted--sneered at the fleeting
phantoms in the show of existence, called the sobbing of women, the
laughter of men, sounds as arid as the whizz of a cracker let off by a
child on the fifth of November.

"We shou