The days and weeks passed.  There had been no sign of his friend....  Then the crisis came.

That old wall-to-screen marathon had been achieved, and so contemptuously banished.  There was now the great business of marching without aid from one end of the room to the other.  This was a long business, and always hitherto somewhere about the middle of it Ernest Henry had sat down suddenly, pretending, even to himself, that his shoe hurt, or that he was bored with the game, and would prefer some other.

There came, then, a beautiful spring evening.  The long low evening sun flooded the room, and somewhere a bell was calling Christian people to their prayers, and somewhere else the old man with the harp, who always came round the Square once every week, was making beautiful music.

Ernest Henry’s father had taken the nurse’s place for an hour, and was reading a Globe with absorbed attention by the window; Mr. Wilberforce, senior, was one of London’s most famous barristers, and the Globe on this particular afternoon had a great deal to say about this able man’s cleverness.  Ernest Henry watched his father, watched the light, heard the bell and the harp, felt that the hour was ripe for his attempt.

He started, and, even as he did so, was aware that, after he had succeeded in this great adventure, things—­that is, life—­would never be quite the same again.  He knew by now every stage of the first half of his journey.  The first instalment was defined by that picture of the garden and the roses and the peacocks; the second by the beginning of the square brown nursery table; and here there was always a swift and very testing temptation to cling, with a sticky hand, to the hard and shining corner.  The third division was the end of the nursery table where one was again tempted to give the corner a final clutch before passing forth into the void.  After this there was nothing, no rest, no possible harbour until the end.

Off Ernest Henry started.  He could see his father, there in the long distance, busied with his paper; he could see the nursery table, with bright-blue and red reels of cotton that nurse had left there; he could see a discarded railway engine that lay gaping there half-way across, ready to catch and trip him if he were not careful.  His eyes were like saucers, the hissing noise came from between his teeth, his forehead frowned.  He passed the peacock, he flung contemptuously aside the proffered corner of the table; he passed, as an Atlantic liner passes the Eddystone, the table’s other end; he was on the last stretch.

Then suddenly he paused.  He lifted his head, caught with his eye a pink, round cloud that sailed against the evening blue beyond the window, heard the harpist, heard his father turn and exclaim, as he saw him.

He knew, as he stood there, that at last the moment had come.  His friend had returned.

All the room was buzzing with it.  The dolls fell in a neglected heap, the train on the carpet, the fire behind the fender, the reels of cotton that were on the table—­they all knew it.