ay and Forty-second Street was madly earning his
pay. Mr. Magee got up and walked the floor. New York!

Probably the telephone in his rooms was jangling, vainly calling forth
to sport with Amaryllis in the shade of the rubber trees Billy
Magee--Billy Magee who sat alone in the silence on Baldpate Mountain.
Few knew of his departure. This was the night of that stupid attempt at
theatricals at the Plaza; stupid in itself but gay, almost giddy, since
Helen Faulkner was to be there. This was the night of the dinner to
Carey at the club. This was the night--of many diverting things.

Mr. Magee picked up a magazine. He wondered how they read, in the old
days, by candlelight. He wondered if they would have found his own
stories worth the strain on the eyes. And he also wondered if absolute
solitude was quite the thing necessary to the composition of the novel
that should forever silence those who sneered at his ability.

Absolute solitude! Only the crackle of the fire, the roar of the wind,
and the ticking of his watch bore him company. He strode to the window
and looked down at the few dim lights that proclaimed the existence of
Upper Asquewan Falls. Somewhere, down there, was the Commercial House.
Somewhere the girl who had wept so bitterly in that gloomy little
waiting-room. She was only three miles away, and the thought cheered Mr.
Magee. After all, he was not on a desert island.

And yet--he was alone, intensely, almost painfully, alone. Alone in a
vast moaning house that must be his only home until he could go back to
the gay city with his masterpiece. What a masterpiece! As though with a
surgeon's knife it would lay bare the hearts of men. No tricks of plot,
no--

Mr. Magee paused. For sharply in the silence the bell of his room
telephone rang out.

He stood for a moment gazing in wonder, his heart beating swiftly, his
eyes upon the instrument on the wall. It was a house phone; he knew that
it could only be rung from the switchboard in the hall below. "I'm going
mad already," he remarked, and took down the receiver.

A blur of talk, an electric muttering, a click, and all was still.

Mr. Magee opened the door and stepped out into the shadows. He heard a
voice below. Noiselessly he crept to the landing, and gazed down into
the office. A young man sat at the telephone switchboard; Mr. Magee
could see in the dim light of a solitary candle that he was a person of
rather hilarious raiment. The candle stood on the top