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. Next day a paragraph in the papers told how Mr. Eustace Lane had bought up all the penny toys of the Strand. Mention was again made of his supposed mission to the Vatican, and a picture drawn of the bewilderment of the Holy Father, roused from contemplation of the eternal to contemplation of jumping pasteboard, and the frigid gestures of people from the world of _papier-mache_. Eustace showed the paragraph to Winifred. “Why will they chronicle all I do?” he said, with a sigh. “Would you rather they did not?” “Oh, if it amuses them,” he answered. “To amuse the world is to be its benefactor.” “No, to comfort the world,” was Winifred’s silent thought. .