This attitude of mind had made him valuable, even endeared him, to

the successful business man, and in his secret heart Rogers had once

or twice felt ashamed of himself. Minks, as it were, knew actual

achievement because he was, forcedly, content with little, whereas he,

Rogers, dreamed of so much, yet took twenty years to come within reach

of what he dreamed. He was always waiting for the right moment to

begin.

His reflections were interrupted by the sunlight, which, pouring in

a flood across the opposite roof, just then dropped a patch of soft

April glory upon the black and yellow check of his carpet slippers.

Rogers got up and, opening the window wider than before, put out his

head. The sunshine caught him full in the face. He tasted the fresh

morning air. Tinged with the sharp sweetness of the north it had a

fragrance as of fields and gardens. Even St. James’s Street could not

smother its vitality and perfume. He drew it with delight into his

lungs, making such a to-do about it that a passer-by looked up to see

what was the matter, and noticing the hanging tassel of a flamboyant

dressing-gown, at once modestly lowered his eyes again.

But Henry Rogers did not see the passer-by in whose delicate mind a

point of taste had thus vanquished curiosity, for his thoughts had

flown far across the pale-blue sky, behind the cannon-ball clouds, up

into that scented space and distance where summer was already winging

her radiant way towards the earth. Visions of June obscured his sight,

and something in the morning splendour brought back his youth and

boyhood. He saw a new world spread about him—a world of sunlight,

butterflies, and flowers, of smooth soft lawns and shaded gravel

paths, and of children playing round a pond where rushes whispered in

a wind of long ago. He saw hayfields, orchards, tea-things spread upon

a bank of flowers underneath a hedge, and a collie dog leaping and

tumbling shoulder high among the standing grass…. It was all

curiously vivid, and with a sense of something about it unfading and

delightfully eternal. It could never pass, for instance, whereas….

‘Ain’t yer forgotten the nightcap?’ sang out a shrill voice from

below, as a boy with a basket on his arm went down the street. He drew

back from the window, realising that he was a sight for all admirers.

Tossing the end of his cigarette in the direction of the cheeky

urchin, he settled himself again in the armchair before the glowing

grate-fire.

But the fresh world he had tasted came back with him. For Henry

Rogers stood this fine spring morning upon the edge of a new life. A

long chapter had just closed behind him. He was on the threshold of

another. The time to begin had come. And the thrill of his freedom now

at hand was very stimulating to his imagination. He was forty, and a

rich man. Twenty years of incessant and intelligent labour had brought

him worldly success. He admitted he had been lucky, where so many toil

on and on till the gates of death stand up and block their way,

fortunate if they have earned a competency through years where hope

and disappointment wage their incessant weary battle. But he, for some

reason known only to the silent Fates, had crested the difficult hill

and now stood firm upon the top to see the sunrise, the dreadful gates

not even yet in sight.