believe you: they are all
in there--they are, I tell you, they are--they _are_!'

In a second he is in the constable's strong grasp and being dragged,
struggling violently, to the gate, when a soft voice, a woman's,
intercedes for him.

'What is the matter? Oh, don't--don't be so rough with him, poor
creature!' it cries pitifully.

'I'm only exercisin' my duty, mum,' says the officer; 'he wants to
create a disturbance 'ere.'

'No,' cries Wilfred, 'he lies! I only want to get into my own house, and
no one seems to hear me. _You_ don't think anything is the matter, do
you?'

It is a lady who has been pleading for him; as he wrests himself from
his captor and comes forward she sees his face, and her own grows white
and startled.

'Wilfred!' she exclaims.

'Why, you know my name!' he says. 'Then you can tell him it's all
right. Do I know you? You speak like--is it--_Ethel_?'

'Yes,' she says, and her voice is low and trembling, 'I am Ethel.'

He is silent for an instant; then he says slowly, 'You are not the
same--nothing is the same: it is all changed--changed--and oh, my God,
what am _I_?'

Slowly the truth is borne in upon his brain, muddled and disordered by
long excess, and the last shred of the illusion which had possessed him
drifts away.

He knows now that his boyhood, with such possibilities of happiness as
it had ever held, has gone for ever. He has been knocking at a door
which will open for him never again, and the mother by whose side his
evening was to have been passed died long long years ago.

The past, blotted out completely for an hour by some freak of the
memory, comes back to him, and he sees his sullen, morbid boyhood
changing into something worse still, until by slow degrees he became
what he is now--dissipated, degraded, lost.

At first the shock, the awful loneliness he awakes to, and the shame of
being found thus by the woman for whom he had felt the only pure love he
had known, overwhelm him utterly, and he leans his head upon his arms as
he clutches the railings, and sobs with a grief that is terrible in its
utter abandonment.

The very policeman is silent and awed by what he feels to be a scene
from the human tragedy, though he may not be able to describe it to
himself by any more suitable phrase than 'a rum start.'

'You can go now, policeman,' says the lady, putting money in his hand.
'You see I know this--this gentleman. Leave him to me; he will give you
no trouble now.'