"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 purpose. And Mr. Bland, his broken heart forgot, slumbers over there." She pointed to the haberdasher inert in a 

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