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 effec