e for the young man. And I certainly don't wish to
hear anything about his skin. Not anything! Do you understand? I'm
very glad you saved his life," he hastened to affirm. "It was very
commendable of you, I'm sure, and some one, doubtless, will be very
much relieved. But for me personally the incident is closed! Closed, I
said. Do you understand?"

Bruskly he turned back toward his own room, and then swung around
again suddenly in the doorway.

"Eve," he frowned. "That was a joke--wasn't it?--what you said about
wanting to keep that young man?"

"Why, of course!" said little Eve Edgarton.

"Well, I must say--it was an exceedingly clumsy one!" growled her
father irritably.

"Maybe so," droned little Eve Edgarton with unruffled serenity. "It
was the first joke, you see, that I ever made." Slowly again her eyes
began to widen. "All the same, Father," she said, "his--"

"Hush!" he ordered, and slammed the door conclusively behind him.

Very thoughtfully for a moment little Eve Edgarton kept right on
standing there in the middle of the room. In her eyes was just the
faintest possible suggestion of a smile. But there was no smile
whatsoever about her lips. Her lips indeed were quite drawn and most
flagrantly set with the expression of one who, having something
determinate to say, will--yet--say it, somewhere, sometime, somehow,
though the skies fall and all the waters of the earth dry up.

Then like the dart of a bird, she flashed to her father's door and
opened it.

"Father!" she whispered. "Father!"

"Yes," answered the half-muffled, pillowy voice. "What is it?"

"Oh, I forgot to tell you something that happened once--down in
Indo-China," whispered little Eve Edgarton. "Once when you were away,"
she confided breathlessly, "I pulled a half-drowned coolie out of a
canal."

"Well, what of it?" asked her father a bit tartly.

"Oh, nothing special," said little Eve Edgarton, "except that his skin
was like yellow parchment! And sand-paper! And old plaster!"

Without further ado then, she turned away, and, except for the single
ecstatic episode of making the four hundred muffins for breakfast,
resumed her pulseless role of being just--little Eve Edgarton.

As for Barton, the subsequent morning hours brought sleep and sleep
only--the sort of sleep that fairly souses the senses in oblivion,
weighing the limbs with lead, the brain with stupor, till the sleeper
rolls out from under the load at last like one half par