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....”

There came then the disastrous hour—­an hour that John was never, in all his after-life, to forget.  On a wild stormy evening he found himself in the nursery.  A week remained now—­to-day fortnight he would be in another world, an alarming, fierce, tremendous world.  He looked at the rocking-horse with its absurd tail and the patch on its back, that had been worn away by its faithful riders, and suddenly he was crying.  This was a thing that he never did, that he had strenuously, persistently refrained from doing all these weeks, but now, in the strangest way, it was the conviction that the world into which he was going wouldn’t care in the least for the doll’s-house, and would mock brutally, derisively at the rocking-horse, that defeated him.  It was even the knowledge that, in a very short time, he himself would be mocking.

He sat down on the floor and cried.  The door opened; before he could resist or make any movement, his mother’s arms were about him, his mother’s cheek against his, and she was whispering:  “Oh, my darling, my darling!”

The horrible thing then occurred.  He was savage, with a wild, fierce, protesting rage.  His cheeks flamed.  His tears were instantly dried.  That he should have been caught thus!  That, when he had been presenting so brave and callous a front to the world, at the one weak and shameful moment he should have been discovered!  He scarcely realised that this was his mother, he did not care who it was.  It was as though he had been delivered into the most horrible and shameful of traps.  He pushed her from him; he struggled fiercely on his feet.  He regarded her with fiery eyes.