And on the following Sunday, when many callers came to Deanery Street, they found him in the drawing-room, playing with a Noah’s ark. Red, green, violet, and azure elephants, antelopes, zebras, and pigs processed along the carpet, guided by an orange-coloured Noah in a purple top-hat, and a perfect parterre of sons and wives. The fixed anxiety of their painted faces suggested that they were in apprehension of the flood, but their rigid attitudes implied trust in the Unseen. Winifred’s face that day seemed changed to those who knew her best. To one man, a soldier who had admired her greatly before her marriage, and\who had seen no reason to change his opinion of her since, she was more cordial than usual, and he went away curiously meditating on the mystery of women. “What has happened to Mrs. Lane?” he thought to himself as he walked down Park Lane. “That last look of hers at me, when I was by the door, going, was--yes, I’ll swear it--Regent Street. And yet Winnie Lane is the purest--I’m hanged if I can make out women! Anyhow, I’ll go there again. People say she and that fantastic ass she’s married are devoted. H’m!” He went to Pall Mall, and sat staring at nothing in his Club till seven, deep in the mystery of the female sex. And he went again to Deanery Street 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.