Now for a scene.  Amid the throng of a London street we distinguish a man, now waxing elderly, with few characteristics to attract careless observers, yet bearing in his whole aspect the handwriting of no common fate for such as have the skill to read it.  He is meagre; his low and narrow forehead is deeply wrinkled; his eyes, small and lustreless, sometimes wander apprehensively about him, but oftener seem to look inward.  He bends his head and moves with an indescribable obliquity of gait, as if unwilling to display his full front to the world.  Watch him long enough to see what we have described, and you will allow that circumstances—­which often produce remarkable men from Nature’s ordinary handiwork—­have produced one such here.  Next, leaving him to sidle along the footwalk, cast your eyes in the opposite direction, where a portly female considerably in the wane of life, with a prayer-book in her hand, is proceeding to yonder church.  She has the placid mien of settled widowhood.  Her regrets have either died away or have become so essential to her heart that they would be poorly exchanged for joy.  Just as the lean man and well-conditioned woman are passing a slight obstruction occurs and brings these two figures directly in contact.  Their hands touch; the pressure of the crowd forces her bosom against his shoulder; they stand face to face, staring into each other’s eyes.  After a ten years’ separation thus Wakefield meets his wife.  The throng eddies away and carries them asunder.  The sober widow, resuming her former pace, proceeds to church, but pauses in the portal and throws a perplexed glance along the street.  She passes in, however, opening her prayer-book as she goes.

And the man?  With so wild a face that busy and selfish London stands to gaze after him he hurries to his lodgings, bolts the door and throws himself upon the bed.  The latent feelings of years break out; his feeble mind acquires a brief energy from their strength; all the miserable strangeness of his life is revealed to him at a glance, and he cries out passionately, “Wakefield, Wakefield!  You are mad!” Perhaps he was so.  The singularity of his situation must have so moulded him to itself that, considered in regard to his fellow-creatures and the business of life, he could not be said to possess his right mind.  He had contrived—­or, rather, he had happened—­to dissever himself from the world, to vanish, to give up his place and privileges with living men without being admitted among the dead.  The life of a hermit is nowise parallel to his.  He was in the bustle of the city as of old, but the crowd swept by and saw him not; he was, we may figuratively say, always beside his wife and at his hearth, yet must never feel the warmth of the one nor the affection of the other.  It was Wakefield’s unprecedented fate to retain his original share of human sympathies and to be still involved in human interests, while he had lost his reciprocal influence on them.  It would be a most curious speculation to trace out the effect of such circumstances on his heart and intellect separately and in unison.  Yet, changed as he was, he would seldom be conscious of it, but deem himself the same man as ever; glimpses of the truth, indeed, would come, but only for the moment, and still he would keep saying, “I shall soon go back,” nor reflect that he had been saying so for twenty years.