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 shapes seemed to flit about him as he lighted a candle. They whispered in his ear that this was to have been the scene of achievement; that here he was to have written the book that should make his place secure. Ah, well, fate had decreed it otherwise. It had set plump in his path the melodrama he had come up to Baldpate to avoid. Ironic fate, she must be laughing now in the sleeve of her kimono. Feeling about in the shadows Magee gathered his things together, put them in his bags, and with a last look at number seven, closed the door forever on its many excitements. A shivering group awaited him at the foot of the stair. Mrs. Norton's hat was on at an angle even the most imaginative milliner could not have approved. The professor looked older than ever; even Miss Thornhill seemed a little less statuesque and handsome in the dusk. Quimby led the way to the door, they passed through it, and Mr. Magee locked it after them with the key Hal Bentley had blithely given him on Forty-fourth Street, New York.