That was in the day-time.  But with the dusk, the discreet shutting of doors and the retreating steps of the last patient, a change came.  It was like the subtle resistless withdrawal of a tide—­a draining away of power.  He could do nothing against it.  He could only sit motionless, bowed over his papers, striving to keep a hold over the personality that was slipping from him.  And then into the emptiness there flowed back slowly, painfully, a strange life—­a stream choked and muddied at its source—­breaking through.

It was a physical thing.  Some sort of nervous reaction.  With the dread of that former break-down overshadowing him he yielded deliberately.  He would leave the house and walk—­anywhere—­but always where there were people—­down Regent Street, sweeping like a broad river into a fiery, restless lake.  There he let go altogether, and the crowds carried him.  He eddied with them in the glittering backwaters of the theatres, and studied the pallid, jaded faces that drifted in and out of the lamp-light with the exaggerated attention of a mind on guard against itself.  He hated it all.  It emphasized and justified his aloofness from the mass of men.  These people were sick and ugly—­sicklier and uglier in their pleasure-seeking than in their stubborn struggle for survival, which had at least some elemental dignity.  It was from their poisoned lives that women like Gyp Labelle sucked their strength.  It was their childish perverted instincts that made her possible.  They made the very thought of immorality a grisly joke.  And yet their nearness, the touch of their ill-grown, ill-cared-for, or grossly over-nurtured bodies against his, the sound of their nasal strident voices brought him relief.  He could not shake off their fascination for him.  He was like a man hanging round the scene of some conquered, unforgotten vice.

It was one dismal November evening that, turning aimlessly into a Soho side-street, he came upon an old man who stood on a soap-box under a lamp and preached.  He held a Bible to the light and read from it, and at intervals leant forward and beat the tattered book with his open hand.

“You hear that, men and women.  This is the liar, the tyrant, the self-confessed devil whom you have worshipped from the beginning of your creation.  You see for yourselves the sort of beast he is.  There isn’t a brute amongst us who would do the things he’s done.  He’s made you fight and kill and torture each other for his sake.  And all down the ages he has laughed at you—­he is laughing now because, after all—­he knows the truth—­he knows what I tell you here night after night”—­and Mr. Ricardo leant forward and pointed a long, dirty finger at the darkness—­“that he doesn’t exist—­that he is a dream—­a myth—­a hope——­”

Someone cheered—­perhaps because the last words had a sound of eloquent conclusion—­and Mr. Ricardo nodded and took breath.  He was like a scarecrow image that had been stuck up by a freakish joker in a London street.  The respectability that still clung to him made him the more ludicrous.  His clothes were the ruined cast-offs of a middle-class tradesman, and over them he wore his old masters gown.  It did not flutter out behind now, but lay dank and heavy along his sides like the wings of a shot bird.