When he went away he looked back once. She was at the gate, watching him with a slow, speculative glance in which he fancied he detected a touch of fear. He took away a vivid impression of her. She was a ruddy-faced young woman in a lilac cotton gown. It was short-waisted, and her linen apron was tied very high, almost under her arms. She seemed oddly shaped—a creature with a minimum of body; all curly head, round, big bust, and long limbs.
*****
He sidled out at the oak gate stealthily. He was so afraid that he would be seen, that someone else would find that walk; someone tainted with the horrible modern idea of Progress; someone who would build and bring machinery. He took the first tram home. The people who also rode on it had never seemed more cadaverous, more fusty. They exhaled an odor of wardrobe shops.
I met him in the square almost at his own doorway. The deep hollows in his face were filled with red. His long hands were quivering with excitement.
“Come up to my rooms,” he said hastily. “I’ve something to tell you, I’ve had a most wonderful experience.”
We went up. He opened the door with his key. Minnie was cooking the dinner, her bit of beefsteak fizzled and sputtered savagely in the pan. Her pretty little pinched face was like a thundercloud.
“Never mind the dinner,” Chaytor said, going up to the fire and kissing her effusively. “My darling! I’ve had such a find. We might go and live there; rent would be next to nothing. My articles would keep the pot boiling. I should insist on your selling your typewriter—no cursed machinery there! I should have to be careful going in and out of the gray gate—that is all. If anyone else spotted it we should be ruined.”
He sat down in the first chair, panting a little. Minnie said impatiently:
“What on earth does he mean?”
She dished up her steak and pressed me none too graciously to have some with them. So we three sat round the little table, and Chaytor told us all he had seen. He told it so vividly—I have repeated it to you almost word for word—that he really flung a glamour over this mean little London room. He sat just there, with his back to the cupboard where they kept their bundles of wood—where I still keep mine. Poor Chaytor! The smell of the country seemed to blow over us all. Even Minnie grew faintly excited.