“What the issue might have been I cannot say.  But suddenly the door opened, a burly carter entered and sat down, and the opportunity was gone.  The Russian waited for no lengthy inspection in the glass like his predecessor.  As soon as he was finished he sprang from the chair, slapped down his coppers in payment and darted out of the shop, only too glad to take himself off in safety.  There must have been something very sinister in my appearance.

“The carter seated himself in the chair and I fell to work on him mechanically.  But my thoughts were with the man who was gone.  What a fiasco it had been!  After waiting all these years, I had met a man whom I suspected to be the very wretch I sought; I had actually been alone with him—­and I had let him go!

“The futility of it!  Before my eyes the grinning tenants of the great wall-case rose in reproach; the little, impassive faces in those shallow boxes seemed to look at me and ask why they had been killed.  I had let the man go; and he would certainly never come to my shop again.  True, I should know him again; but what better chance should I ever have of identifying him?  And then again came the unanswerable question:  Was he really the man, after all?

“So my thoughts fluttered to and fro.  Constant, only, was a feeling of profound dejection; a sense of unutterable, irretrievable failure.  The carter—­a regular customer—­rose and looked askance at me as he rubbed his face with the towel.  He remarked that I ’seemed to be feeling a bit dull tonight,’ paid his fee, and, with a civil ‘good evening,’ took his departure.

“When he had gone I stood by the chair wrapped in a gloomy reverie.  Had I failed finally?  Was my long quest at an end with my object unachieved?  It almost seemed so.

“I raised my eyes and they fell on my reflection in the large mirror; and suddenly it was borne in on me that I was an old man.  The passing years of labor and mental unrest had left deep traces.  My hair, which was black when I first came to the east, was now snow-white and the face beneath it was worn and wrinkled and aged.  The sands of my life were running out apace.  Soon the last grains would trickle out of the glass; and then would come the end—­the futile end, with the task still unaccomplished.  And for this I had dragged out these twenty weary years, ever longing for repose and the eternal reunion!  How much better to have spent those years in the peace of the tomb by the dear companion of my sunny hours!

“I stepped up to the glass to look more closely at my face, to mark the crow’s-feet and intersecting wrinkles in the shrunken skin.  Yes, it was an old, old face; a weary face, too, that spoke of sorrow and anxious thought and strenuous, unsatisfying effort.  And presently it would be a dead face, calm and peaceful enough then; and the wretch who had wrought all the havoc would still stalk abroad with his heavy debt unpaid.