She was eying Chaytor with a look that boded a row. He suddenly wheeled round sharply; even she was startled, I think, by the change in his face—it was gray, like the gate of which he talked.
“It isn’t here,” he said in a quavering voice. “It’s gone—the gray gate. Gone!”
He looked at us with panic-stricken eyes. Then he started eagerly back, peering into every passage. When he reached the last he turned again.
“It’s gone,” he repeated. “Oh, my God! it’s gone. I’ve lost it!”
He let his head drop, and leaned helplessly against the railings of the next house. Minnie glanced at me eloquently, raising her nose and brows and shoulders.
“Let’s get him home,” she said in an agony for appearances. “There is a tram at the corner. Hurry up. Don’t be such a fool, Nat. I never was so ashamed in my life. There was nothing—I never expected there would be. Just see how that woman across the way is staring. Well she may! I knew there would not be anything. How could there be? You can see the back-garden palings and the dust hole at the end of every one.”
We had reached the tram. She bundled Chaytor up the steps and followed him, not seeming to care whether I came or not.
He was never the same afterward. He never wrote an article. He talked of nothing but the gray gate. He used to beg Minnie piteously for his tram fare. Sometimes she gave the coppers just to be rid of him.
“He’s going ‘dotty,’” she said fiercely to me, beating the inanimate type with her quick fingers.
Sometimes he would wake up in the morning and sing as he dressed—putting on his clothes with feverish, jerking hands, she used to come and tell me. He said he had made a mistake in the row—those cursed villas were so much alike. Would she come too? He was sure of finding it this time. He wouldn’t bother her for any more tram fares. He was very sorry.