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Page 48
"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 lonely existence 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."
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