"Who would have guessed a week ago that to-day I would be climbing the broad staircase of a summer hotel carrying a pail of water for a lady fair?"

They paused on the landing.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio," smiled the girl, "than are dreamed of, even by novelists." Mr. Magee started. Had she recognized him as the Magee of light fiction? It seemed hardly likely; they read his books, but they rarely remembered his name. Her face went suddenly grave. She came closer. "I can't help wondering," she said, "which side you are on?"

"Which side of what?" asked Magee.

"Why, of this," she answered, waving her hand toward the office below.

"I don't understand," objected Mr. Magee.

"Let's not be silly," she replied. "You know what brought me here. I know what brought you. There are three sides, and only one is honest. I hope, so very much, that you are on that side."

"Upon my word--" began Magee.

"Will it interest you to know," she continued, "I saw the big mayor of Reuton in the village this morning? With him was his shadow, Lou Max.

Let's see--you had the first key, Mr. Bland the second, the professor the third, and I had the fourth. The mayor has the fifth key, of course.

He'll be here soon."

"The mayor," gasped Mr. Magee. "Really, I haven't the slightest idea what you mean. I'm here to work--"

"Very well," said the girl coldly, "if you wish it that way." They came to the door of seventeen, and she took the pail from Mr. Magee's hand.

"Thanks."

"'Where are you going, my pretty maid?'" asked Magee, indicating the pail.

"'"I'll see you at luncheon, sir," she said,'" responded Miss Norton, and the door of seventeen slammed shut.

Mr. Magee returned to number seven, and thoughtfully stirred the fire.

The tangle of events bade fair to swamp him.

"The mayor of Reuton," he mused, "has the fifth key. What in the name of common sense is going on? It's too much even for melodramatic me." He leaned back in his chair. "Anyhow, I like her eyes," he said. "And I shouldn't want to be quoted as disapproving of her hair, either. I'm on her side, whichever it may be."

CHAPTER VI

GHOSTS OF THE SUMMER CROWD

"I wonder," Miss Norton smiled up into Mr. Magee's face, "if you ever watched the people at a summer hotel get set on their mark for the sprint through the dining-room door?"

"No," answered Magee, "but I have visited the Zoo at meal-time. They tell me it is much the same."

"A brutal comparison," said the girl. "But just the same I'm sure that the head waiter who opens the door here at Baldpate must feel much the same at the moment as the keeper who proffers the raw meat on the end of the pitchfork. He faces such a wild determined mob. The front rank is made up of hard-faced women worn out by veranda gossip. Usually some stiff old dowager crosses the tape first. I was thinking that perhaps we resembled that crowd in the eyes of Mr. Peters now."

It was past one o'clock, and Mr. Magee with his four mysterious companions stood before the fire in the office, each with an eager eye out for the progress of the hermit, who was preparing the table beside them. Through the kindness of Quimby, the board was resplendent with snowy linen.

"We may seem over-eager," commented Professor Bolton. "I have no doubt we do. It is only natural. With nothing to look forward to but the next meal, the human animal attaches a preposterous importance to his feeding. We are in the same case as the summer guests--"

"Are we?" interrupted Mr. Magee. "Have we nothing but the next meal to look forward to? I think not. I haven't. I've come to value too highly the capacity for excitement of Baldpate Inn in December. I look forward to startling things. I expect, before the day is out, at least two gold-laced kings, an exiled poet, and a lord mayor, all armed with keys to Baldpate Inn and stories strange and unconvincing."

"Your adventures of the last twenty-four hours," remarked the professor, smiling wanly, "have led you to expect too much. I have made inquiries of Quimby. There are, aside from his own, but seven keys in all to the various doors of Baldpate Inn. Four are here represented. It is hardly likely that the other three will send delegates, and if they should, you have but a slim chance for kings and poets. Even Baldpate's capacity for excitement, you see, is limited by the number of little steel keys which open its portals to exiles from the outside world. I am reminded of the words of the philosopher--"

"Well, Peters, old top," broke in Mr. Bland in robust tones, "isn't she nearly off the fire?"

"Now see here," said the hermit, setting down the armful of dishes with which he had entered the office, "I can't be hurried. I'm all upset, as it is. I can't cook to please women--I don't pretend to. I have to take all sorts of precautions with this lunch. Without meaning to be impolite, but just because of a pa.s.sion for cold facts, I may say that women are faultfinding."

"I'm sure," said Miss Norton sweetly, "that I shall consider your luncheon perfect."

"They get more faultfinding as they get older," replied Mr. Peters ungallantly, glancing at the other woman.

Mrs. Norton glared.

"Meaning me, I suppose," she rasped. "Well, don't worry. I ain't going to find anything wrong."

"I ain't asking the impossible," responded Mr. Peters. "I ain't asking you not to find anything wrong. I'm just asking you not to mention it when you do." He retired to the kitchen.

Mrs. Norton caressed her puffs lovingly.

"What that man needs," she said, "is a woman's guiding hand. He's lived alone too long. I'd like to have charge of him for a while. Not that I wouldn't be kind--but I'd be firm. If poor Norton was alive to-day he'd testify that I was always kindness itself. But I insisted on his living up to his promises. When I was a girl I was mighty popular. I had a lot of admirers."

"No one could possibly doubt that," Mr. Magee a.s.sured her.

"Then Norton came along," she went on, rewarding Magee with a smile, "and said he wanted to make me happy. So I thought I'd let him try. He was a splendid man, but there's no denying that in the years we were married he sometimes forgot what he started out to do. I always brought him up sharp. 'Your great desire,' I told him, 'is to make me happy. I'd keep on the job if I was you!' And he did, to the day of his death. A perfectly lovely man, though careless in money matters. If he hadn't had that failing I wouldn't be--"

Miss Norton, her cheeks flushed, broke in hurriedly.

"Mamma, these gentlemen can't be at all interested." Deftly she turned the conversation to generalities.

Mr. Peters at last seated the winter guests of Baldpate Inn, and opened his luncheon with a soup which he claimed to have wrested from a can.

This news drew from Professor Bolton a learned discourse on the tinned aids to the hermit of to-day. He pictured the seeker for solitude setting out for a desert isle, with canned foods for his body and canned music for his soul. "Robinson Crusoe," he said, "should be rewritten with a can-opener in the leading role." Mrs. Norton gave the talk a more practical turn by bringing up the topic of ptomaine poisoning.

While the conversation drifted on, Mr. Magee pondered in silence the weird mesh in which he had become involved. What did it all mean? What brought these people to Baldpate Christmas week? His eyes sought the great safe back of the desk, and stayed there a long time. In that safe, he was sure, lay the answer to this preposterous riddle. When his thoughts came back to the table he found Mr. Bland eying him narrowly.

There was a troubled look on the haberdasher's lean face that could never be ascribed to the cruelty of Arabella.

The luncheon over, Miss Norton and her mother prepared to ascend to their rooms. Mr. Magee maneuvered so as to meet the girl at the foot of the stairs.

"Won't you come back," he whispered softly, "and explain things to a poor hermit who is completely at sea?"

"What things?" she asked.

"What it all means," he whispered. "Why you wept in the station, why you invented the story of the actress, why you came here to brighten my drab exile--what this whole comedy of Baldpate Inn amounts to, anyhow? I a.s.sure you I am as innocent of understanding it as is the czar of Russia on his golden throne."

She only looked at him with unbelieving eyes.

"You can hardly expect me to credit that," she said. "I must go up now and read mamma into the pleasant land of thin girlish figures that is her afternoon siesta. I may come back and talk to you after a while, but I don't promise to explain."