“Did the fellows—­make it disagreeable?”

“Beastly...  Carnaby held a council over me for wanton lying.  I remember how I sneaked home and upstairs to hide the marks of my blubbering.  But when I cried myself to sleep at last it wasn’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.