Ruth did not add anything to this discussion. What she had discovered regarding the hermit’s scenario was of too serious a nature to be publicly discussed.
Her interview the evening before with Mr. Hammond regarding the matter had left Ruth in a most uncertain frame of mind. She did not know what to do about the stolen scenario. She shrank from telling even Helen or Tom of her discovery.
To tell the truth, Mr. Hammond’s seeming doubt—not of her truthfulness but of her wisdom—had shaken the girl’s belief in herself. It was a strange situation, indeed. She thought of the woman she had found wandering about the mountain in the storm who had lost control of both her nerves and her mind, and Ruth wondered if it could be possible that she, too, was on the verge of becoming a nervous wreck.
Had she deceived herself about this hermit’s story? Had she allowed her mind to dwell on her loss until she was quite unaccountable for her mental decisions? To tell the truth, this thought frightened the girl of the Red Mill a little.
Practical as Ruth Fielding ordinarily was, she must confess that the shock she had received when the hospital in France was partly wrecked, an account of which is given in “Ruth Fielding Homeward Bound,” had shaken the very foundations of her being. She shuddered even now when she thought of what she had been through in France and on the voyage coming back to America.
She realized that even Tom and Helen looked at her sometimes when she spoke of her lost scenario in a most peculiar way. Was it a fact that she had allowed her loss to unbalance—well, her judgment? Suppose she was quite wrong about that scenario the hermit had submitted to Mr. Hammond? The thought frightened her!
At least, she had nothing to say upon the puzzling subject, not even to her best and closest friends. She was sorry indeed two hours later when they were at lunch on the porch of the Reef Harbor House with some of the Camerons’ friends that Helen brought the conversation around again to the Beach Plum Point “hermit.”
“A real hermit?” cried Cora Grimsby, a gay, blonde, irresponsible little thing, but with a heart of gold. “And is he a hermit for revenue only, too?”
“What do you mean by that?” Helen demanded.
“Why, we have a hermit here, you see. Over on Reef Island itself. If you give us a sail in your motor yacht after lunch I’ll introduce our hermit to you. But you must buy something of him, or otherwise ‘cross his palm with silver.’ He told me one day that he was not playing a nut for summer folks to laugh at just for the good of his health.”