it. But
just now--I don't seem in the mood, somehow. Would you mind saving it
for me till later?"

"Certainly," sighed the professor. Mr. Bland slouched into the depths of
his chair. Professor Bolton turned his disappointed face ceilingward.
Laughing, Mr. Magee sought the solitude of number seven.

"After all, I'm here to work," he told himself. "Alarms and excursions
and blue eyes must not turn me from my task. Let's see--what was my
task? A deep heart-searching novel, a novel devoid of rabid melodrama.
It becomes more difficult every minute here at Baldpate Inn. But that
should only add more zest to the struggle. I devote the next two hours
to thought."

He pulled his chair up before the blazing hearth, and gazed into the red
depths. But his thoughts refused to turn to the masterpiece that was to
be born on Baldpate. They roamed to far-off Broadway; they strolled with
Helen Faulkner--the girl he meant to marry if he ever got round to
it--along dignified Fifth Avenue. Then joyously they trooped to a far
more alluring, more human girl, who pressed a bit of cambric to her face
in a railway station, while a ginger-haired agent peeped through the
bars. How ridiculously small that bit of cambric had been to hide so
much beauty. Soon Mr. Magee's thoughts were climbing Baldpate Mountain,
there to wander in a mystic maze of ghostly figures which appeared from
the shadows, holding aloft in triumph gigantic keys. Mr. Magee had slept
but little the night before. The quick December dusk filled number seven
when he awoke with a start.

He remembered that he had asked the girl to come back to the office, and
berated himself to think that probably she had done so only to find that
he was not there. Hastily straightening his tie, and dashing the traces
of sleep from his eyes with the aid of cold water, he ran down-stairs.

The great bare room was in darkness save for the faint red of the fire.
Before the fireplace sat the girl of the station, her hair gleaming with
a new splendor in that light. She looked in mock reproval at Mr. Magee.

"For shame," she said, "to be late at the trysting-place."

"A thousand pardons," Mr. Magee replied. "I fell asleep and dreamed of a
girl who wept in a railway station--and she was so altogether charming I
could not tear myself away."

"I fear," she laughed, "you are old in the ways of the world. A passion
for sleep seems to have seized the hermits. The professor has gone to
his room for that