But at
length he laid his hand upon the door that divided him from Fate."

*****

And when he had read the final words he gathered the loose sheets
together with his long, thin fingers, and placed them one on the top
of the other in a neat pile. He put them into a drawer which contained
other unfinished manuscripts, shut the drawer, locked it, and carried
the key to Henley's room. There he scribbled some words on a bit of
notepaper, wrapped the key in it, and inclosed it in an envelope on
which he wrote Henley's name. Then he put on his overcoat, descended the
narrow stairs, and opened the front-door. The landlady heard him, and
screamed from the basement to know if he would be in to dinner.

"I shall not be in at all to-night," he answered, in a hard, dry voice
that travelled along the dingy passage with a penetrating distinctness.
The landlady murmured to the slatternly maidservant an ejaculatory
diatribe on the dissipatedness of young literary gentlemen as the door
banged. Trenchard disappeared in the gathering darkness, and soon left
Smith's Square behind him.

It chanced that day that, in the theatre, Henley encountered some
ladies who carried him home to tea after the performance. They lived in
Chelsea, and in returning to Smith's Square afterwards Henley took his
way along the Chelsea Embankment. He always walked near to the dingy
river when he could. The contrast of its life to the town's life through
which it flowed had a perpetual fascination for him. In the early
evening, too, the river presents many Dore effects. It is dim,
mysterious, sometimes meretricious, with its streaks of light close to
the dense shadows that lie under the bridges, its wailful, small waves
licking the wharves, and bearing up the inky barges that look like the
ferry-boat of the Styx. Henley loved to feel vivaciously despairing, and
he hugged himself in the belief that the Thames at nightfall tinged his
soul with a luxurious melancholy, the capacity for which was not far
from rendering him a poet. So he took his way by the river. As he neared
Cheyne Row, he saw in front of him the figure of a man leaning over
the low stone wall, with his face buried in his hands. On hearing his
approaching footsteps the man lifted himself up, turned round, and
preceded him along the pavement with a sort of listless stride which
seemed to Henley strangely familiar. He hastened his steps, and on
coming closer recognised that the man was Trenchard; bu