Page:Earl Derr Biggers - Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913).djvu/138

120 "A thousand pardons," Mr. Magee replied. "I fell asleep and dreamed of a girl who wept in a railway station—and she was so altogether charming I could not tear myself away."

"I fear," she laughed, "you are old in the ways of the world. A passion for sleep seems to have seized the hermits. The professor has gone to his room for that purpose. And Mr. Bland, his broken heart forgot, slumbers over there." She pointed to the haberdasher inert in a big chair drawn up near the clerk's desk. "Only you and I in all the world awake."

"Pretty lonesome, isn't it?" Mr. Magee glanced over his shoulder at the shadows that crept in on them.

"I was finding it very busy when you came," she answered. "You see, I have known the inn when it was gay with summer people, and as I sat here by the fire I pretended I saw the ghosts of a lot of the people I knew flitting about in the dusk. The rocking-chair fleet sailed by—"

"The what?"

"Black flag flying, decks cleared for action—I saw the rocking-chair fleet go by." She smiled