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
and the first faint star showed above the pines, the hermit got the can
of baking-powder from his cupboard. He still smiled behind his beard.

There was a slight rustle in the doorway. There stood Edith Carr, with
all the added beauty and stateliness and noble bearing that ten years
had brought her.

She was never one to chatter. She looked at the hermit with her large,
_thinking_, dark eyes. The hermit stood still, surprised into a pose as
motionless as her own. Only his subconscious sense of the fitness of
things caused him to turn the baking-powder can slowly in his hands
until its red label was hidden against his bosom.

"I am stopping at the inn," said Edith, in low but clear tones. "I heard
of you there. I told myself that I _must_ see you. I want to ask your
forgiveness. I sold my happiness for money. There were others to be
provided for--but that does not excuse me. I just wanted to see you
and ask your forgiveness. You have lived here ten years, they tell me,
cherishing my memory! I was blind, Hampton. I could not see then that
all the money in the world cannot weigh in the scales against a faithful
heart. If--but it is too late now, of course."

Her assertion was a question clothed as best it c