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. “Wild,” he answered. “When are they going to let me out? When? When?” The little Red Doctor had given me no hint upon this point. So I said non-committally: “Soon, I think,” and moved around the bed to where an easy-chair invited. It was a wicker chair, broad-seated, wide-armed, and welcoming, a chair made conformable and gracious by long usage, a chair for lovers, for high hopes and for dreams, a chair to solace troubles and soothe weariness. Into it I would have dropped gratefully, when the sick man's fingers closed on my wrist like the jaws of an animal, and I was all but jerked from my feet. “Not there!” he snarled insanely. “Not there!” “I beg your pardon,” I said, much discomposed. “I didn't mean to hurt you,” he returned with a return to that habitual gentleness of address which, by its contrast with his formidable physique, gave him the aspect of a kindly and companionable bear. “But if you don't mind sitting here on the bed? Or yonder on the sofa? Or anywhere except--” “Not in the least,” I assured him. “The fact is, I detest wicker chairs anyway. I had to get rid of mine.” “Did you? Why?” “It was no companion for an old, lonely man.” The Gnome clutched me again. His fingers quivered as they bit into my arm. “I know! It whispered. Didn't it?” I nodded. “So does mine. Strange things. Echoes of what you can't forget.” “Yes, yes. I know.” “Do you, now? I wonder. Perhaps you do.” He studied my face with his luminous eyes, and then closed them and fell back, speaking slowly and dreamily. “In the darkness when I can see the chair just enough to know that it's empty as--as an empty heart--I hear it stirring, stirring softly, adjusting itself to--to what is not there. And I hold my breath and pray. But--nothing more.” He opened his eyes that seemed to gaze out across barriers of pain and incomprehension. “Dominie, does yours--did yours keep its secrets?”