stified my caution... Ralphs, I knew, would leave us
beyond the Kensington High Street, and then I could surprise Gurker by a
sudden frankness. One has sometimes to resort to these little devices...
And then it was that in the margin of my field of vision I became aware
once more of the white wall, the green door before us down the road.

"We passed it talking. I passed it. I can still see the shadow of Gurker's
marked profile, his opera hat tilted forward over his prominent nose, the
many folds of his neck wrap going before my shadow and Ralphs' as we
sauntered past.

"I passed within twenty inches of the door. 'If I say good-night to them,
and go in,' I asked myself, 'what will happen?' And I was all a-tingle for
that word with Gurker.

"I could not answer that question in the tangle of my other problems.
'They will think me mad,' I thought. 'And suppose I vanish now!---Amazing
disappearance of a prominent politician!' That weighed with me. A thousand
inconceivably petty worldlinesses weighed with me in that crisis."

Then he turned on me with a sorrowful smile, and, speaking slowly, "Here I
am!" he said.

"Here I am!" he repeated, "and my chance has gone from me. Three times in
one year the door has been offered me--the door that goes into peace, into
delight, into a beauty beyond dreaming, a kindness no man on earth can
know. And I have rejected it, Redmond, and it has gone----"

"How do you know?"

"I know. I know. I am left now to work it out, to stick to the tasks that
held me so strongly when my moments came. You say I have success--this
vulgar, tawdry, irksome, envied thing. I have it." He had a walnut in his
big hand. "If that was my success," he said, and crushed it, and held it
out for me to see.

"Let me tell you something, Redmond. This loss is destroying me. For two
months, for ten weeks nearly now, I have done no work at all, except the
most necessary and urgent duties. My soul is full of inappeasable regrets.
At nights--when it is less likely I shall be recognised--I go out. I
wander. Yes. I wonder what people would think of that if they knew. A
Cabinet Minister, the responsible head of that most vital of all
departments, wandering alone--grieving--sometimes near audibly lamenting--
for a door, for a garden!"

IV.

I can see now his rather pallid face, and the unfamiliar sombre fire that
had come into his eyes. I see him very vividly to-night. I sit recalling
his words, his tones, and last