almost concealed two fairy Oxfords, also of one of the forty-seven

shades of blue. The hermit, as if impelled by a kind of reflex-
telepathic action, drew his bare toes farther beneath his gunny-

sacking.
"I have heard about the romance of your life," said Miss Trenholme,

softly. "They have it printed on the back of the menu card at the
inn. Was she very beautiful and charming?"

"On the bills of fare!" muttered the hermit; "but what do I care for
the world's babble? Yes, she was of the highest and grandest type.

Then," he continued, "then I thought the world could never contain
another equal to her. So I forsook it and repaired to this mountain

fastness to spend the remainder of my life alone--to devote and
dedicate my remaining years to her memory."

"It's grand," said Miss Trenholme, "absolutely grand. I think a
hermit's life is the ideal one. No bill-collectors calling, no

dressing for dinner--how I'd like to be one! But there's no such luck
for me. If I don't marry this season I honestly believe mamma will

force me into settlement work or trimming hats. It isn't because I'm
getting old or ugly; but we haven't enough money left to butt in at

any of the swell places any more. And I don't want to marry--unless
it's somebody I like. That's why I'd like to be a hermit. Hermits

don't ever marry, do they ?"
"Hundreds of 'em," said the hermit, "when they've found the right

one."
"But they're hermits," said the youngest and beautifulest, "because

they've lost the right one, aren't they?"
"Because they think they have," answered the recluse, fatuously.

"Wisdom comes to one in a mountain cave as well as to one in the world
of 'swells,' as I believe they are called in the argot."

"When one of the 'swells' brings it to them," said Miss Trenholme.
"And my folks are swells. That's the trouble. But there are so many

swells at the seashore in the summer-time that we hardly amount to
more than ripples. So we've had to put all our money into river and

harbor appropriations. We were all girls, you know. There were four
of us. I'm the only surviving one. The others have been married off.

All to money. Mamma is so proud of my sisters. They send her the
loveliest pen-wipers and art calendars every Christmas. I'm the only

one on the market now. I'm forbidden to look at any one who hasn't
money."

"But--" began the hermit.
"But, oh," said the beautifulest "of course hermits have great pots of

gold and doubloons buried somewhere near three great oak-trees. They
all have."

"I have not," said the hermit, regretfully.
"I'm so sorry," said Miss Trenholme. "I always thought they had. I

think I must go now."
Oh, beyond question, she was the beautifulest.

"Fair lady--" began the hermit.
"I am Beatrix Trenholme--some call me Trix," she said. "You must come

to the inn to see me."
"I haven't been a stone's--throw from my cave in ten years," said the

hermit.
"You must come to see me there," she repeated. "Any evening except

Thursday."
The hermit smiled weakly.

"Good-bye," she said, gathering the folds of her pale-blue skirt. "I
shall expect you. But not on Thursday evening, remember."

What an interest it would give to the future menu cards of the
Viewpoint Inn to have these printed lines added to them: "Only once

during the more than ten years of his lonelyexistence did the
mountain hermit leave his famous cave. That was when he was

irresistibly drawn to the inn by the fascinations of Miss Beatrix
Trenholme, youngest and most beautiful of the celebrated Trenholme

sisters, whose brilliant marriage to--"
Aye, to whom?

The hermit walked back to the hermitage. At the door stood Bob
Binkley, his old friend and companion of the days before he had

renounced the world--Bob, himself, arrayed like the orchids of the
greenhouse in the summer man's polychromatic garb--Bob, the

millionaire, with his fat, firm, smooth, shrewd face, his diamond
rings, sparkling fob-chain, and pleated bosom. He was two years older

than the hermit, and looked five years younger.
"You're Hamp Ellison, in spite of those whiskers and that going-away

bathrobe," he shouted. "I read about you on the bill of fare at the
inn. They've run your biography in between the cheese and 'Not

Responsible for Coats and Umbrellas.' What 'd you do it for, Hamp?
And ten years, too--geewhilikins!"

"You're just the same," said the hermit. "Come in and sit down. Sit
on that limestone rock over there; it's softer than the granite."

"I can't understand it, old man," said Binkley. "I can see how you
could give up a woman for ten years, but not ten years for a woman.

Of course I know why you did it. Everybody does. Edith Carr. She
jilted four or five besides you. But you were the only one who took

to a hole in the ground. The others had recourse to whiskey, the
Klondike, politics, and that similia similibus cure. But, say--Hamp,

Edith Carr was just about the finest woman in the world--high-toned
and proud and noble, and playing her ideals to win at all kinds of

odds. She certainly was a crackerjack."
"After I renounced the world," said the hermit, "I never heard of her

again."
"She married me," said Binkley.

The hermit leaned against the wooden walls of his ante-cave and
wriggled his toes.

"I know how you feel about it," said Binkley. "What else could she
do? There were her four sisters and her mother and old man Carr--you

remember how he put all the money he had into dirigible balloons?
Well, everything was coming down and nothing going up with 'em, as

you might say. Well, I know Edith as well as you do--although I
married her. I was worth a million then, but I've run it up since to

between five and six. It wasn't me she wanted as much as--well, it
was about like this. She had that bunch on her hands, and they had to

be taken care of. Edith married me two months after you did the
ground-squirrel act. I thought she liked me, too, at the time."

"And now?" inquired the recluse.
"We're better friends than ever now. She got a divorce from me two

years ago. Just incompatibility. I didn't put in any defence. Well,
well, well, Hamp, this is certainly a funny dugout you've built here.

But you always were a hero of fiction. Seems like you'd have been the
very one to strike Edith's fancy. Maybe you did--but it's the bank -

roll that catches 'em, my boy--your caves and whiskers won't do it.
Honestly, Hamp, don't you think you've been a darned fool?"

The hermit smiled behind his tangled beard. He was and always had
been so superior to the crude and mercenary Binkley that even his

vulgarities could not anger him. Moreover, his studies and
meditations in his retreat had raised him far above the little

vanities of the world. His little mountain-side had been almost an
Olympus, over the edge of which he saw, smiling, the bolts hurled in

the valleys of man below. Had his ten years of renunciation, of
thought, of devotion to an ideal, of living scorn of a sordid world,

been in vain? Up from the world had come to him the youngest and
beautifulest--fairer than Edith--one and three-seventh times lovelier

than the seven-years-served Rachel. So the hermit smiled in his
beard.

When Binkley had relieved the hermitage from the blot of his presence