ar
green door. 'Odd!' said I to myself, 'but I thought this place was
on Campden Hill. It's the place I never could find somehow--like
counting Stonehenge--the place of that queer day dream of mine.'
And I went by it intent upon my purpose. It had no appeal to me
that afternoon.

"I had just a moment's impulse to try the door, three steps
aside were needed at the most--though I was sure enough in my heart
that it would open to me--and then I thought that doing so might
delay me on the way to that appointment in which I thought my
honour was involved. Afterwards I was sorry for my punctuality--I
might at least have peeped in I thought, and waved a hand to those
panthers, but I knew enough by this time not to seek again
belatedly that which is not found by seeking. Yes, that time made
me very sorry . . . . .

"Years of hard work after that and never a sight of the door.
It's only recently it has come back to me. With it there has come
a sense as though some thin tarnish had spread itself over my world.
I began to think of it as a sorrowful and bitter thing that I should
never see that door again. Perhaps I was suffering a little from
overwork--perhaps it was what I've heard spoken of as the feeling
of forty. I don't know. But certainly the keen brightness that
makes effort easy has gone out of things recently, and that just
at a time with all these new political developments--when I ought to
be working. Odd, isn't it? But I do begin to find life toilsome,
its rewards, as I come near them, cheap. I began a little while ago
to want the garden quite badly. Yes--and I've seen it three times."

"The garden?"

"No--the door! And I haven't gone in!"

He leaned over the table to me, with an enormous sorrow in his
voice as he spoke. "Thrice I have had my chance--_thrice!_ If ever
that door offers itself to me again, I swore, I will go in out of
this dust and heat, out of this dry glitter of vanity, out of these
toilsome futilities. I will go and never return. This time I will
stay . . . . . I swore it and when the time came--_I didn't go_.

"Three times in one year have I passed that door and failed to
enter. Three times in the last year.

"The first time was on the night of the snatch division on the
Tenants' Redemption Bill, on which the Government was saved by a
majority of three. You remember? No one on our side--perhaps very
few on the opposite side--expected the end that night. Then the
deba