s very nose . . . . ."

Yet the interest was not always out of him, and when he was
holding his attention to a thing Wallace could contrive to be an
extremely successful man. His career, indeed, is set with
successes. He left me behind him long ago; he soared up over my
head, and cut a figure in the world that I couldn't cut--anyhow.
He was still a year short of forty, and they say now that he would
have been in office and very probably in the new Cabinet if he had
lived. At school he always beat me without effort--as it were by
nature. We were at school together at Saint Athelstan's College in
West Kensington for almost all our school time. He came into the
school as my co-equal, but he left far above me, in a blaze of
scholarships and brilliant performance. Yet I think I made a fair
average running. And it was at school I heard first of the Door in
the Wall--that I was to hear of a second time only a month before
his death.

To him at least the Door in the Wall was a real door leading
through a real wall to immortal realities. Of that I am now quite
assured.

And it came into his life early, when he was a little fellow
between five and six. I remember how, as he sat making his
confession to me with a slow gravity, he reasoned and reckoned the
date of it. "There was," he said, "a crimson Virginia creeper in
it--all one bright uniform crimson in a clear amber sunshine
against a white wall. That came into the impression somehow,
though I don't clearly remember how, and there were horse-chestnut
leaves upon the clean pavement outside the green door. They were
blotched yellow and green, you know, not brown nor dirty, so that
they must have been new fallen. I take it that means October. I
look out for horse-chestnut leaves every year, and I ought to know.

"If I'm right in that, I was about five years and four months old."

He was, he said, rather a precocious little boy--he learned to
talk at an abnormally early age, and he was so sane and
"old-fashioned," as people say, that he was permitted an amount of
initiative that most children scarcely attain by seven or eight.
His mother died when he was born, and he was under the less
vigilant and authoritative care of a nursery governess. His father
was a stern, preoccupied lawyer, who gave him little attention, and
expected great things of him. For all his brightness he found life
a little grey and dull I think. And one day he wandered.

He could not r