He stared at me. “That's almost what she asked me?” he replied. “She said: 'Is that all you have to say to me, Leon?' I didn't get her meaning. I was intent on the one thing--the bargain: that I mustn't make love to her; that I mustn't catch her in my arms and hold her against my heart that was bursting with love of her. The fever was on me, then, too, and I suppose that kept me to the one idea that was burning in my brain. “'We can go to the Greek church, on the other side of the square,' I said. 'When can you be ready?' “She walked back into her room, and I never saw her again.” “God forgive you for a fool!” I said. “Why didn't you tell her what every woman wants to hear, that you loved her?” “Why, she must have known it; she must have realized it a thousand times, by a thousand signs. Yet she left me--that way.” “You've had nothing from her since?” “Yes. A money order for the balance of what she owed me.” An involuntary, jealous clutch at his pillow told me that the money order had not been and would not be cashed. “No word with it?” “Just gratitude.” The Gnome's sensitive lips quivered. “What do I want with gratitude? I want _her!_ I want to find her. Suppose she were in trouble again. She's so young and helpless!” “MacLachan never meant--” “I went out to kill MacLachan next day. I was having pretty good luck at it too, when Terry the Cop came in. They brought me back here and called the doctor, and MacLachan cried out of one eye, for the other was closed.” I recalled the tailor's black eye. Further I recalled that when some other-world business had taken me to Fifth Avenue I had there encountered Mac (of all persons) in (of all places) a millinery store. The fragments of his conversation which I caught related to ostriches. To my inquiry he replied that he was pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp, and that it was a lawful occupation. The suspicion now lodged in my mind that Mac had been searching for a lost trail. Of this I said nothing to Leon. “Sometimes at night,” the sick man went on, “when I am not longing to smash up all the world because I can't get out and find her, she comes and sits in the wicker chair, and I hear the pressure of her dear body against the withes, and I feel her breath in the silence, but she never speaks. Is she dead, do you think?” I most emphatically declined to entertain any such hypothesis. As for the Gnome, it seemed that he soon might be. The Little Red Doctor's visits grew more frequent, and his brow more corrugated, and his eyes more perplexed. Once he went so far as to observe in my hearing that nature could go just about so far without sleep and then it cracked. “Through that crack,” he remarked, “enters sometimes my old friend, Death, sometimes madness. Let's pray that it won't be madness in the Gnome's case.”