The two had found a lodging in an old house in Hampstead, not far from the Consumption Hospital. Laura had objected to the hospital, but Owen refused to recognize it as a thing of fear. He had fallen in love with the house. It topped a rise, at the end of the precipitous lane that curls out of the great modern High Street. It stood back in its garden, its narrow, flat-eyed windows staring over the wall down the lane. Laura wasn't sure that she quite liked it. "What are you looking at?" she said, as he paused before this house. "I'm looking at that," said Prothero. He pointed to an old, disused iron gate, and to the design, curl within curl of slender, aspiring curves, that grew and branched and overflowed, in tendrils of almost tremulous grace, and in triple leaves, each less like a leaf than a three-tongued flame. Insubstantial as lace-work against the green background of the garden, it hung rather than stood between its brick pillars, its edges fretted and fringed with rust, consumed in a delicate decay. A stout iron railing guarded this miracle of art and time. Thus cut off from the uses of life, it gave to the place an air of almost unbearable mystery and isolation; it stirred the sense of mortality, of things that having passed through that doorway would not return. "That house looks and feels as if it had ghosts in it," she said. "So it has. Not the ghosts of people who have died. The ghosts of people who have never been born. The people," he said, "who come through the iron gate." And as she looked at it again and at the untrodden grass behind it, she felt that this masterpiece of iron tortured into beauty was an appropriate symbol of their life. Of Owen's, rather than of hers. Closed as it was to all corporeal creatures, there yet went through it presences, intelligences, the august procession of the dreams. It was flanked by a postern door, a little humble door in the wall of the garden. That was the door, Laura said, through which her little humble dreams would go out into the world to make their living. "Poor Owen," she said, "it's the door _you'll_ have to go through." He smiled. "And the other," he said, "is the door I shall come back through when I'm gone." That was what she couldn't bear to think of, the necessity she laid on him of going, as it were, for ever through the postern door. He was after all such a supernatural, such a disembodied thing. He had at times the eyes of a young divinity innocent of creation, untouched by the shames and terrors of the apparent world. And she knew it was the desire they had for each other that had brought him back from his divine borders and that held him in her world. There were moments when she felt that he maintained his appearance there by an effort so intense that it must be torture.