evening's _Westminster Gazette_ still
lies on my sofa, containing the notice of his death. At lunch to-day the
club was busy with his death. We talked of nothing else.

They found his body very early yesterday morning in a deep excavation near
East Kensington Station. It is one of two shafts that have been made in
connection with an extension of the railway southward. It is protected
from the intrusion of the public by a hoarding upon the high road, in
which a small doorway has been cut for the convenience of some of the
workmen who live in that direction. The doorway was left unfastened
through a misunderstanding between two gangers, and through it he made his
way...

My mind is darkened with questions and riddles.

It would seem he walked all the way from the House that night--he has
frequently walked home during the past Session--and so it is I figure his
dark form coming along the late and empty streets, wrapped up, intent. And
then did the pale electric lights near the station cheat the rough
planking into a semblance of white? Did that fatal unfastened door awaken
some memory?

Was there, after all, ever any green door in the wall at all?

I do not know. I have told his story as he told it to me. There are times
when I believe that Wallace was no more than the victim of the coincidence
between a rare but not unprecedented type of hallucination and a careless
trap, but that indeed is not my profoundest belief. You may think me
superstitious, if you will, and foolish; but, indeed, I am more than
half convinced that he had, in truth, an abnormal gift, and a sense,
something--I know not what---that in the guise of wall and door offered
him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape into another and
altogether more beautiful world. At any rate, you will say, it betrayed
him in the end. But did it betray him? There you touch the inmost mystery
of these dreamers, these men of vision and the imagination. We see our
world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our daylight standard
he walked out of security into darkness, danger, and death.

But did he see like that?

XXXII.

THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND.

Three hundred miles and more from Chimborazo, one hundred from the snows
of Cotopaxi, in the wildest wastes of Ecuador's Andes, there lies that
mysterious mountain valley, cut off from the world of men, the Country of
the Blind. Long years ago that valley lay so far open to the world tha