The hermit had hermited there for ten years.  He was an asset of the Viewpoint Inn.  To its guests he was second in interest only to the Mysterious Echo in the Haunted Glen.  And the Lover’s Leap beat him only a few inches, flat-footed.  He was known far (but not very wide, on account of the topography) as a scholar of brilliant intellect who had forsworn the world because he had been jilted in a love affair.  Every Saturday night the Viewpoint Inn sent to him surreptitiously a basket of provisions.  He never left the immediate outskirts of his hermitage.  Guests of the inn who visited him said his store of knowledge, wit, and scintillating philosophy were simply wonderful, you know.

That summer the Viewpoint Inn was crowded with guests.  So, on Saturday nights, there were extra cans of tomatoes, and sirloin steak, instead of “rounds,” in the hermit’s basket.

Now you have the material allegations in the case.  So, make way for Romance.

Evidently the hermit expected a visitor.  He carefully combed his long hair and parted his apostolic beard.  When the ninety-eight-cent alarm-clock on a stone shelf announced the hour of five he picked up his gunny-sacking skirts, brushed them carefully, gathered an oaken staff, and strolled slowly into the thick woods that surrounded the hermitage.

He had not long to wait.  Up the faint pathway, slippery with its carpet of pine-needles, toiled Beatrix, youngest and fairest of the famous Trenholme sisters.  She was all in blue from hat to canvas pumps, varying in tint from the shade of the tinkle of a bluebell at daybreak on a spring Saturday to the deep hue of a Monday morning at nine when the washerwoman has failed to show up.

Beatrix dug her cerulean parasol deep into the pine-needles and sighed.  The hermit, on the q. t., removed a grass burr from the ankle of one sandalled foot with the big toe of his other one.  She blued—­and almost starched and ironed him—­with her cobalt eyes.

“It must be so nice,” she said in little, tremulous gasps, “to be a hermit, and have ladies climb mountains to talk to you.”

The hermit folded his arms and leaned against a tree.  Beatrix, with a sigh, settled down upon the mat of pine-needles like a bluebird upon her nest.  The hermit followed suit; drawing his feet rather awkwardly under his gunny-sacking.

“It must be nice to be a mountain,” said he, with ponderous lightness, “and have angels in blue climb up you instead of flying over you.”

“Mamma had neuralgia,” said Beatrix, “and went to bed, or I couldn’t have come.  It’s dreadfully hot at that horrid old inn.  But we hadn’t the money to go anywhere else this summer.”

“Last night,” said the hermit, “I climbed to the top of that big rock above us.  I could see the lights of the inn and hear a strain or two of the music when the wind was right.  I imagined you moving gracefully in the arms of others to the dreamy music of the waltz amid the fragrance of flowers.  Think how lonely I must have been!”