The girl deliberately stopped. There was never less of sweet gracious surrender in a suffragette hurling a stone through a shop-keeper's window. She eyed Mr. Magee pityingly, and they stood until Mr. Max caught up with them.

"So that's the hermit's shack," said Max, indicating the little wooden hut at which they had arrived. "A funny place for a guy to bury himself.

I should think he'd get to longing for the white lights and the table d'hotes with red wine."

"A very unromantic speech," reproved the girl. "You should be deeply thrilled at the thought of penetrating the secrets of the hermitage. I am. Are you, Mr. Magee?"

She smiled up at Magee, and he was in that state where he thought that in the blue depths of her eyes he saw the sunny slopes of the islands of the blest.

"I--" he caught himself in time. He would not be idiot enough to babble it again. He pulled himself together. "I'm going to make you believe in me," he said, with a touch of his old jauntiness.

Mr. Max was knocking with characteristic loudness at the hermit's door.

CHAPTER XI

A FALSEHOOD UNDER THE PALMS

"Make me a willow cabin at your gate," quoted Mr. Magee, looking at the hermit's shack with interest.

"U-m-m," replied Miss Norton. Thus beautiful sentiments frequently fare, even at the hands of the most beautiful. Mr. Magee abandoned his project of completing the speech.

The door of the hermit's abode opened before Mr. Max's masterful knock, and the bearded little man appeared on the threshold. He was clad in a purple dressing-gown that suggested some woman had picked it. Surely no man could have fallen victim to that riot of color.

"Come in," said the hermit, in a tone so colorless it called added attention to the gown. "Miss, you have the chair. You'll have to be contented with that soap-box davenport, gentlemen. Well?"

He stood facing them in the middle of his hermitage. With curious eyes they examined its architecture. Exiled hands had built it of poles and clay and a reliable brand of roofing. In the largest room, where they sat, were chairs, a table, and a book-shelf hammered together from stray boards--furniture midway between that in a hut on a desert isle and that of a home made happy from the back pages of a woman's magazine. On the wall were various posters that defined the hermit's taste in art as inflammatory, bold, arresting. Through one door at the rear they caught a glimpse of a tiny kitchen; through another the white covering of a hall-room cot could be seen.

"Well?" repeated Mr. Peters. "I suppose you're a delegation, so to speak?"

"A cold unfeeling word," objected Mr. Magee.

"We have come to plead"--began Miss Norton, turning her eyes at their full candle-power on the hermit's bearded face.

"I beg pardon, miss," interrupted Mr. Peters, "but it ain't any use.

I've thought it all out--in the night watches, as the poet says. I came up here to be alone. I can't be a hermit and a cook, too. I can't and be true to myself. No, you'll have to accept my resignation, to take effect at once."

He sat down on an uncertain chair and regarded them sorrowfully. His long well-shaped fingers clutched the cord of the purple gown.

"It isn't as though we were asking you to give up the hermit business for good," argued Magee. "It's just for a short time--maybe only for a few days. I should think you would welcome the diversion."

Mr. Peters shook his head vigorously. The brown curls waved flippantly about his shoulders.

"My instincts," he replied, "are away from the crowd. I explained that to you when we first met, Mr. Magee."

"Any man," commented Mr. Max, "ought to be able to strangle his instincts for a good salary, payable in advance."

"You come here," said the hermit with annoyance, "and you bring with you the sentiments of the outside world--the world I have foresworn. Don't do it. I ask you."

"I don't get you," reflected Mr. Max. "No, pal, I don't quite grab this hermit game. It ain't human nature, I say. Way up here miles from the little bra.s.s rail and the sporting extra, and other things that make life worth living. It's beyond me."

"I'm not asking your approval," replied the hermit. "All I ask is to be let alone."

"Let me speak," said Miss Norton. "Mr. Peters and I have been friends, you might say, for three years. It was three years ago my awed eyes first fell upon him, selling his post-cards at the inn. He was to me then--the true romance--the man to whom the world means nothing without a certain woman at his side. That is what he has meant to all the girls who came to Baldpate. He isn't going to shatter my ideal of him--he isn't going to refuse a lady in distress. You will come for just a little while, won't you, Mr. Peters?"

But Peters shook his head again.

"I dislike women as a s.e.x," he said, "but I've always been gentle and easy with isolated examples of 'em. It ain't my style to turn 'em down.

But this is asking too much. I'm sorry. But I got to be true to my oath--I got to be a hermit."

"Maybe," sneered Mr. Max, "he's got good reason for being a hermit.

Maybe there's bra.s.s b.u.t.tons and blue uniforms mixed up in it."

"You come from the great world of suspicion," answered the hermit, turning reproving eyes upon him. "Your talk is natural--it goes with the life you lead. But it isn't true."

"And Mr. Max is the last who should insinuate," rebuked Mr. Magee. "Why, only last night he denounced suspicion, and bemoaned the fact that there is so much of it in the world."

"Well he might," replied the hermit. "Suspicion is the key-note of modern life--especially in New York." He drew the purple dressing-gown closer about his plump form. "I remember the last time I was in the big town, seeing a crowd of men in the grill-room of the Hoffman House. One of them--long, lean, like an eel--stooped down and whispered in the ear of a little fellow with a diamond horseshoe desecrating his haberdashery, and pointing to another man near by. 'No, I won't,' says the man with the diamonds, 'I don't introduce n.o.body to n.o.body. Let every man play his own game, I say.' That's New York. That's the essence of the town. 'I introduce n.o.body to n.o.body.'"

"It seems odd," remarked Mr. Magee, "to hear you speak of the time you walked on pavements."

"I haven't always been on Baldpate Mountain," replied the hermit. "Once I, too, paid taxes and wore a derby hat and sat in barbers' chairs. Yes, I sat in 'em in many towns, in many corners of this little round globe.

But that's all over now."

The three visitors gazed at Mr. Peters with a new interest.

"New York," said Mr. Max softly, as a better man might have spoken the name of the girl he loved. "Its a great little Christmas tree. The candles are always burning and the tinsel presents always look good to me."

The hermit's eyes strayed far away--down the mountain--and beyond.

"New York," said he, and his tone was that in which Max had said the words. "A great little Christmas tree it is, with fine presents for the reaching. Sometimes, at night here, I see it as it was four years ago--I see the candles lit on the Great White Way--I hear the elevated roar, and the newsboys shout, and Diamond Jim Brady applauding at a musical comedy's first night. New York!"

Mr. Max rose pompously and pointed a yellow finger at the Hermit of Baldpate Mountain.

"I got you!" he cried in triumph. "I'm wise! You want to go back."

A half-hearted smile crossed the visible portion of the hermit's face.

"I guess I'm about the poorest liar in the world," he said. "I never got away with but one lie in my life, and that was only for a little while.

It was a masterpiece while it lasted, too. But it was my only hit as a liar. Usually I fail, as I have failed now. I lied when I said I couldn't cook for you because I had to be true to my hermit's oath. That isn't the reason. I'm afraid."

"Afraid?" echoed Mr. Magee.

"Scared," said Mr. Peters, "of temptation. Your seventh son of a seventh son friend here has read my palm O. K. I want to go back. Not in the summer, when the inn blazes like Broadway every evening, and I can sit here and listen to the latest comic opera tunes come drifting up from the casino, and go down and mingle with the muslin brigade any time I want, and see the sympathetic look in their eyes as they buy my postals.

It ain't then I want to go back. It's when fall comes, and the trees on the mountain are bare, and Quimby locks up the inn, and there's only the wind and me on the mountain--then I get the fever. I haven't the post-card trade to think of--so I think of Ellen, and New York.

She's--my wife. New York--it's my town.