'I tell you I live here, you fool!' shrieks Wilfred, in deadly terror lest he should be forced away before the door is opened. 'And I tell you you don't do nothing of the sort,' says the policeman, beginning to lose his temper. 'No one don't live 'ere, nor ain't done not since I've bin on the beat. Use your eyes if you're not too far gone.' For the first time Rolleston seems to see things plainly as they are; he glances round the square--that is just as it always is on foggy winter evenings, with its central enclosure a shadowy black patch against a reddish glimmer, beyond which the lighted windows of the houses make yellow bars of varying length and tint. But this house, his own--why, it is all shuttered and dark; some of the window panes are broken; there is a pale grey patch in one that looks like a dingy bill; the knocker has been unscrewed from the door, and on its scraped panels someone has scribbled words and rough caricatures that were surely not there when he left that morning. Can anything--any frightful disaster--have come in that short time? No, he will not think of it; he will not let himself be terrified, all for nothing. 'Now, are you goin'?' says the policeman after a pause. Rolleston puts his back against the door and clings to the sides. 'No!' he shouts. 'I don't care what you say; I don't 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.