iage
that waited outside. He did not look round. It was a picture he wished
to avoid.

So this was the end--the end of his two and a half days of solitude--the
end of his light-hearted exile on Baldpate Mountain. He thought of
Bland, lean and white of face, gay of garb, fleeing through the night,
his Arabella fiction disowned in the real tragedy that had followed. He
thought of Cargan and Max, also fleeing, wrathful, sneering, by Bland's
side. He thought of Hayden, jolting down the mountain in that black
wagon. So it ended.

So it ended--most preposterous end--with William Hallowell Magee madly,
desperately, in love. By the gods--in love! In love with a fair
gay-hearted girl for whom he had fought, and stolen, and snapped his
fingers at the law as it blinked at him in the person of Professor
Bolton. Billy Magee, the calm, the unsusceptible, who wrote of a popular
cupid but had always steered clear of his shots. In love with a girl
whose name he did not know; whose motives were mostly in the fog. And he
had come up here--to be alone.

For the first time in many hours he thought of New York, of the fellows
at the club, of what they would say when the jocund news came that Billy
Magee had gone mad on a mountainside, He thought of Helen Faulkner,
haughty, unperturbed, bred to hold herself above the swift catastrophies
of the world. He could see the arch of her patrician eyebrows, the shrug
of her exquisite shoulders, when young Williams hastened up the avenue
and poured into her ear the merry story. Well--so be it He had never
cared for her. In her superiority he had found a challenge, in her icy
indifference a trap, that lured him on to try his hand at winning her.
But he had never for a moment caught a glimmering of what it was really
to care--to care as he cared now for the girl who had gone from
him--somewhere--down the mountain.

Quimby dragged into the room, the strain of a rather wild night in Upper
Asquewan Falls in his eyes.

"Jake Peters asked me to tell you he ain't coming back," he said. "Mis'
Quimby is getting breakfast for you down at our house. You better pack
up now and start down, I reckon. Your train goes at half past six."

Mrs. Norton jumped up, proclaiming that she must be aboard that train at
any cost. Miss Thornhill, the professor and Kendrick ascended the
stairs, and in a moment Magee followed.

He stepped softly into number seven, for the tragedy of the rooms was
still in the air. Vague sha