Mr. Magee had given
him. "I guess nothing will interfere with your lonesomeness. Leastways,
I hope it won't. Good night."

Mr. Magee bade the man good night, and listened to the thump of his
boots, and the closing of the great front door. From his windows he
watched the caretaker move down the road without looking back, to
disappear at last in the white night.

Throwing off his great coat, Mr. Magee noisily attacked the fire. The
blaze flared red on his strong humorous mouth, in his smiling eyes.
Next, in the flickering half-light of suite seven, he distributed the
contents of his traveling-bags about. On the table he placed a number of
new magazines and a few books.

Then Mr. Magee sat down in the big leather chair before the fire, and
caught his breath. Here he was at last. The wild plan he and Hal Bentley
had cooked up in that Forty-fourth Street club had actually come to be.
"Seclusion," Magee had cried. "Bermuda," Bentley had suggested. "A
mixture of sea, hotel clerks, and honeymooners!" the seeker for solitude
had sneered. "Some winter place down South,"--from Bentley. "And a
flirtation lurking in every corner!"--from Magee. "A country town where
you don't know any one." "The easiest place in the world to get
acquainted. I must be alone, man! Alone!" "Baldpate Inn," Bentley had
cried in his idiom. "Why, Billy--Baldpate Inn at Christmas--it must be
old John H. Seclusion himself."

Yes, here he was. And here was the solitude he had come to find. Mr.
Magee looked nervously about, and the smile died out of his gray eyes.
For the first time misgivings smote him. Might one not have too much of
a good thing? A silence like that of the tomb had descended. He recalled
stories of men who went mad from loneliness. What place lonelier than
this? The wind howled along the balcony. It rattled the windows. Outside
his door lay a great black cave--in summer gay with men and maids--now
like Crusoe's island before the old man landed.

"Alone, alone, all, all alone," quoted Mr. Magee. "If I can't think here
it will be because I'm not equipped with the apparatus. I will. I'll
show the gloomy old critics! I wonder what's doing in New York?"

New York! Mr. Magee looked at his watch. Eight o'clock. The great street
was ablaze. The crowds were parading from the restaurants to the
theaters. The electric signs were pasting lurid legends on a long
suffering sky; the taxis were spraying throats with gasoline; the
traffic cop at Broadw