“Quite so. What, for example?”
“Oh, everything,” he said, with a gesture of his big hands, indicating a broad generality. “Just a sort of outline of my life. I wanted her to know me as I was.” I wondered how many youths of my acquaintance in Our Square, or out, could afford to tell “everything” as a method of winning a young girl's confidence. But the Gnome, as I have indicated, was something of a phenomenon.
“So I lent her money and courage to go on with. And that evening, when we had walked and talked I said to her: 'Where will you go to-night?' and she said: 'Tell me.' So I brought her here to live.”
“Here?” I exclaimed.
“What are you thinking?” he growled. “Don't think it. Open that door.”
He pointed to the far corner of the room. I did as directed. “Look on the other side of it. What do you see?”
What I saw on the further side of the door was an oak bar set in iron clamps. Beyond was a tiny room and a tiny white bed and a flower in a pot on the window sill, dead and withered in the heat. Opposite the window an exit led to the hallway.
“There she lived and sang and was happy for fifty-five days. Each day was more glorious than the last for me. She stopped being afraid almost at once. It was just an even week after she came that she tapped on the door, when I had settled down to read my evening away.
“'May I come in?' she asked.
“'Yes,' I said.