He found himself, now that the "twenty-third" was gaping right there in front of him, with its fiery throat wide and flaming, doing the strangest thing. He was frightened of the dusk, he would run through the passage and up the stairs at breathless speed, he would look for a moment at the lamp-lit square with the lights of the opposite houses tigers' eyes, and the trees filmy like smoke, then would hastily draw the curtains and greet the warm inhabited room with a little gasp of reassurance. Strangest of all, he found himself often in the old nursery at the top of the house. Very seldom did any one come there now, and it had the pathos of a room grown cold and comfortless. Most of the toys were put away or given to hospitals, but the rocking-horse with his Christmas-tree tail was there, and the doll's-house, and a railway with trains and stations. He was here. He was saying to himself: "Yes, it was just over there, by the window, that He came that time. He talked to me there. That other time it was when I was down by the doll's-house. He showed me the smoke coming up from the chimneys when the sun stuck through, and the moon was all red one night, and the stars." He found himself gazing out over the square, over the twisted chimneys, that seemed to be laughing at him, over the shining wires and glittering roofs, out to the mist that wrapped the city beyond his vision--so vast, so huge, so many people--March Square was nothing. He was nothing--John Scarlett nothing at all. Then, with a sigh, he turned back. His Friend, the other night, had been real enough. Fairies, ghosts, goblins and dragons--everything was real. Everything. It was all terrible, terrible to think of, but, above and beyond all else, he must not forget, on the day of his departure, that farewell; something disastrous would come upon him were he so ungrateful. And then he would go downstairs again, down to newspapers and fires, toast and tea, the large print of Frith's "Railway Station," and the coloured supplement of Greiffenhagen's "Idyll," and the tattered numbers of the _Windsor_ and the _Strand_ magazines, and, behold, all these things were real and all the things in the nursery unreal. Could it be that both worlds were real? Even now, at his tender years, that old business of connecting the Dream and the Business was at his throat. "Teal Tea! Tea!" Frantic screams from May. "There's some new jam, and, John, mother says she wants you to try on some underclothes afterwards. Those others didn't do, she said...."