“Just a moment. What is the object of the Gnome's excursions? To get work?”
“No. To search.”
“For what?”
The Little Red Doctor moved toward an approaching horse car, almost the last of that perishing genus in New York City. “Heaven knows!” he called back. “And Mac, the tailor, at least suspects. That's as far as I can get.”
He leaped upon the bobtailed vehicle, was immediately held up by a forehanded conductor, and too tardily bethought himself of a forgotten point. “The chair! The chair!” he bellowed. “Look out for the chair!”
“What chair?” I shouted back.
He made as if he would jump off and return. But he had already paid his nickel, so he only waved despairingly. Nickels count in Our Square.
No. 7 opened to me with a musty smell of stale heat. Built in the magnificent days of the neighborhood, by a senator of the United States, it had fallen to the base uses of machine workers on the lower and furnished lodgings on the upper floors. The very walls seemed to sweat as I made my way up to the dim light at the top, where the Gnome's door stood open, hopelessly inviting a draft. Upon my entrance a huge and fumbling creature from the lithographic plant where the Gnome was an assistant rose and made gloomy and bashful adieus.
Leon Coventry reached a great, thin hand across the littered bed to make me welcome. Even in his illness he preserved that suggestion of bowed and gnarled power, strangely alien to his youthfulness, which had given him his nickname in Our Square. Some would have called him ugly of face. But his mouth had the austere sweetness of a saint or a sufferer, and in his eyes glowed a living fire which might tame beasts or subdue hearts.
“How are you feeling to-night?” I asked perfunctorily.