The young man nodded.  “He lives on fools like me.  But he threatened to tell my father, and now I’ve just about ruined him.  Pah!  Swine!”

“This won’t be much better for your father,” said Bennett gravely.

“No, it’s worse; but perhaps it will help some of the others.  He kept on threatening and I couldn’t wait any longer.  Can’t you see?”

Over the young man’s shoulder the stars becked and nodded to Bennett through the blindless window.

“I see,” he said; “I see.”

“So now you can take me.”

Bennett looked doubtfully at the outstretched wrists.  “You are only a fool,” he said, “a dreaming fool like me, and they will give you years for this.  I don’t see why they should give a man years for being a fool.”

The young man looked up, taken with a sudden hope.  “You will let me go?” he said, in astonishment.  “I know I was an ass just now.  I suppose I was a bit shaken.  But you will let me go?”

“I wish to God I had never seen you!” said Bennett simply.  “You have your father, and I have a wife and three little children.  Who shall judge between us?”

“My father is an old man.”

“And my children are little.  You had better go before I make up my mind.”

Without another word the young man crept out of the room, and Bennett followed him slowly into the street.  This gallant criminal whose capture would have been honourable, had dwindled to a hysterical foolish boy; and aided by his own strange impulse this boy had ruined him.  The burglary had taken place on his beat; there would be an inquiry; it did not need that to secure his expulsion from the force.  Once in the street he looked up hopefully to the heavens; but now the stars seemed unspeakably remote, though as he passed along his beat his wife and his three little children were walking by his side.

III

Bennett had developed mentally without realising the logical result of his development until it smote him with calamity.  Of his betrayal of trust as a guardian of property he thought nothing; of the possibility of poverty for his family he thought a great deal—­all the more that his dreamer’s mind was little accustomed to gripping the practical.  It was strange, he thought, that his final declaration of war against his position should have been a little lacking in dignity.  He had not taken the decisive step through any deep compassion of utter poverty bravely borne.  His had been no more than trivial pity of a young man’s folly; and this was a frail thing on which to make so great a sacrifice.  Yet he regretted nothing.  His task of moral guardian of men and women had become impossible to him, and sooner or later he must have given it up.  And there was also his family.  “I must come to some decision,” he said to himself firmly.

And then the great scream fell upon his ears and echoed through his brain for ever and ever.  It came from the house before which he was standing, and he expected the whole street to wake aghast with the horror of it.  But there followed a silence that seemed to emphasise the ugliness of the sound.  Far away an engine screamed as if in mocking imitation; and that was all.  Bennett had counted up to a hundred and seventy before the door of the house opened, and a man came out on to the steps.