own across her eyes, and one
steel-wristed little hand dragging a mountain laurel bush almost as
big as herself. Close behind her followed her father, equally shabby,
his shapeless pockets fairly bulging with rocks, a battered tin botany
kit in one hand, a dingy black camera-box in the other.

Impulsively Barton started out to meet them, but just a step from the
threshold of the piazza door he sensed for the first time the long
line of smokers watching the two figures grinningly above their puffy
brown pipes and cigars.

"What is it?" called one smoker to another. "Moving Day in Jungle
Town?"

"Ha! Ha! Ha!" tittered the whole line of smokers. "Ha!--Ha! Ha!
Ha!--Ha!"

So, because he belonged, not so much to the type of person that can't
stand having its friends laughed at, as to the type that can't stand
having friends who are liable to be laughed at, Barton changed his
mind quite precipitately about identifying himself at that particular
moment with the Edgarton family, and whirled back instead to the
writing-room. There, by the aid of the hotel clerk, and two bell-boys,
and three new blotters, and a different pen, and an entirely fresh
bottle of ink, and just exactly the right-sized, the right-tinted sort
of letter paper, he concocted a perfectly charming note to little Eve
Edgarton--a note full of compliment, of gratitude, of sincere
appreciation, a note reiterating even once more his persistent
intention of rendering her somewhere, sometime, a really significant
service!

Whereupon, thus duly relieved of his truly honest effort at
self-expression, he went back again to his own kind--to the
prattling, the well-groomed, the ultra-fashionables of both mind and
body. And there on the shining tennis-courts and the soft golf greens,
through the late yellow afternoon and the first gray threat of
twilight, the old sickening ennui came creeping back to his senses,
warring chaotically there with the natural nervous reaction of his
recent adventure, till just out of sheer morbid unrest, as soon as the
flower-scented, candle-lighted dinner hour was over, he went stalking
round and round the interminable piazzas, hunting in every dark corner
for Mr. Edgarton and his daughter.

Meeting them abruptly at last in the full glare of the office, he
clutched fatuously at Mr. Edgarton's reluctant attention with some
quick question about the extraordinary moonlight, and stood by,
grinning like any bashful schoolboy, while Mr. Edga