Often Mr. Magee had thought of the moment when he would tell his love to a woman. It was a moment of dim lights, music perhaps in the distance, two souls caught up in the magic of the moonlit night--a pretty graceful speech from him, a sweet gracious surrender from the girl. And this--instead. "I love you." In heaven's name, was he never going to stop saying it? "I want you to believe." Bright morning on the mountain, a girl in an angry mood at his side, a seedy chaperon on his trail, an erring cook ahead. Good lord! He recalled that a fellow novelist, whose love scenes were regarded as models by young people suffering the tender passion, had once confessed that he proposed to his wife on a street-car, and was accepted just as the conductor handed him his transfers. Mr. Magee had been scornful. He could never be scornful again. By a tremendous effort he avoided repeating his childish refrain. The girl deliberately stopped. There was never less of sweet gracious surrender in a suffragette hurling a stone through a shop-keeper's window. She eyed Mr. Magee pityingly, and they stood until Mr. Max caught up with them. "So that's the hermit's shack," said Max, indicating the little wooden hut at which they had arrived. "A funny place for a guy to bury himself. I should think he'd get to longing for the white lights and the table d'hôtes with red wine." "A very unromantic speech," reproved the girl. "You should be deeply thrilled at the thought of penetrating the secrets of the hermitage. I am. Are you, Mr. Magee?" She smiled up at Magee, and he was in that state where he thought that in the blue depths of her eyes he saw the sunny slopes of the islands of the blest. "I--" he caught himself in time. He would not be idiot enough to babble it again. He pulled himself together. "I'm going to make you believe in me," he said, with a touch of his old jauntiness. Mr. Max was knocking with characteristic loudness at the hermit's door. CHAPTER XI A FALSEHOOD UNDER THE PALMS "Make me a willow cabin at your gate," quoted Mr. Magee, looking at the hermit's shack with interest. "U-m-m," replied Miss Norton. Thus beautiful sentiments frequently fare, even at the hands of the most beautiful. Mr. Magee abandoned his project of completing the speech. The door of the hermit's abode opened before Mr. Max's masterful knock, and the bearded little man appeared on the threshold. He was clad in a purple dressing-gown that suggested some woman had picked it. Surely no man could have fallen victim to that riot of color. "Come in," said the hermit, in a tone so colorless it called added attention to the gown. "Miss, you have the chair. You'll have to be contented with that soap-box davenport, gentlemen. Well?"