“No one to love, none to caress,
     Left all alone in this world’s wilderness.”

As he paused to strop his razor, Marcus came into his room, half-dressed, a startling phantom in red flannels.

Marcus often ran back and forth between his room and the dentist’s “Parlors” in all sorts of undress.  Old Miss Baker had seen him thus several times through her half-open door, as she sat in her room listening and waiting.  The old dressmaker was shocked out of all expression.  She was outraged, offended, pursing her lips, putting up her head.  She talked of complaining to the landlady.  “And Mr. Grannis right next door, too.  You can understand how trying it is for both of us.”  She would come out in the hall after one of these apparitions, her little false curls shaking, talking loud and shrill to any one in reach of her voice.

“Well,” Marcus would shout, “shut your door, then, if you don’t want to see.  Look out, now, here I come again.  Not even a porous plaster on me this time.”

On this Wednesday morning Marcus called McTeague out into the hall, to the head of the stairs that led down to the street door.

“Come and listen to Maria, Mac,” said he.

Maria sat on the next to the lowest step, her chin propped by her two fists.  The red-headed Polish Jew, the ragman Zerkow, stood in the doorway.  He was talking eagerly.

“Now, just once more, Maria,” he was saying.  “Tell it to us just once more.”  Maria’s voice came up the stairway in a monotone.  Marcus and McTeague caught a phrase from time to time.

“There were more than a hundred pieces, and every one of them gold—­just that punch-bowl was worth a fortune-thick, fat, red gold.”

“Get onto to that, will you?” observed Marcus.  “The old skin has got her started on the plate.  Ain’t they a pair for you?”

“And it rang like bells, didn’t it?” prompted Zerkow.

“Sweeter’n church bells, and clearer.”

“Ah, sweeter’n bells.  Wasn’t that punch-bowl awful heavy?”

“All you could do to lift it.”

“I know.  Oh, I know,” answered Zerkow, clawing at his lips.  “Where did it all go to?  Where did it go?”

Maria shook her head.

“It’s gone, anyhow.”

“Ah, gone, gone!  Think of it!  The punch-bowl gone, and the engraved ladle, and the plates and goblets.  What a sight it must have been all heaped together!”

“It was a wonderful sight.”

“Yes, wonderful; it must have been.”

On the lower steps of that cheap flat, the Mexican woman and the red-haired Polish Jew mused long over that vanished, half-mythical gold plate.

Marcus and the dentist spent Washington’s Birthday across the bay.  The journey over was one long agony to McTeague.  He shook with a formless, uncertain dread; a dozen times he would have turned back had not Marcus been with him.  The stolid giant was as nervous as a schoolboy.  He fancied that his call upon Miss Sieppe was an outrageous affront.  She would freeze him with a stare; he would be shown the door, would be ejected, disgraced.