asn't for Carnaby, but for the
garden, for the beautiful afternoon I had hoped for, for the sweet
friendly women and the waiting playfellows, and the game I had hoped to
learn again, that beautiful forgotten game...

"I believed firmly that if I had not told--... I had bad times after
that--crying at night and wool-gathering by day. For two terms I slackened
and had bad reports. Do you remember? Of course you would! It was
_you_--your beating me in mathematics that brought me back to the
grind again."

III.

For a time my friend stared silently into the red heart of the fire. Then
he said: "I never saw it again until I was seventeen.

"It leapt upon me for the third time--as I was driving to Paddington on my
way to Oxford and a scholarship. I had just one momentary glimpse. I was
leaning over the apron of my hansom smoking a cigarette, and no doubt
thinking myself no end of a man of the world, and suddenly there was the
door, the wall, the dear sense of unforgettable and still attainable
things.

"We clattered by--I too taken by surprise to stop my cab until we were
well past and round a corner. Then I had a queer moment, a double and
divergent movement of my will: I tapped the little door in the roof of the
cab, and brought my arm down to pull out my watch. 'Yes, sir!' said the
cabman, smartly. 'Er--well--it's nothing,' I cried. '_My_ mistake! We
haven't much time! Go on!' And he went on...

"I got my scholarship. And the night after I was told of that I sat over
my fire in my little upper room, my study, in my father's house, with his
praise--his rare praise--and his sound counsels ringing in my ears, and I
smoked my favourite pipe--the formidable bulldog of adolescence--and
thought of that door in the long white wall. 'If I had stopped,' I
thought, 'I should have missed my scholarship, I should have missed
Oxford--muddled all the fine career before me! I begin to see things
better!' I fell musing deeply, but I did not doubt then this career of
mine was a thing that merited sacrifice.

"Those dear friends and that clear atmosphere seemed very sweet to me,
very fine but remote. My grip was fixing now upon the world. I saw another
door opening--the door of my career."

He stared again into the fire. Its red light picked out a stubborn
strength in his face for just one flickering moment, and then it vanished
again.

"Well," he said and sighed, "I have served that career. I have done--much
work, much hard wo