y she opened her eyes and stared around.

"Eve!" gasped her father, "what have you been doing?"

Vaguely the troubled eyes closed, and then opened again. "I
was--trying--to show people--that I was a--rose," mumbled little Eve
Edgarton.

Swiftly her father came running to her side. He thought it was her
deathbed statement. "But Eve?" he pleaded. "Why, my own little girl.
Why, my--"

Laboriously the big eyes lifted to his. "Mother was a rose," persisted
the stricken lips desperately.

"Yes, I know," sobbed her father. "But--but--"

"But--nothing," mumbled little Eve Edgarton. With an almost superhuman
effort she pushed her sharp little chin across the confining edge of
the blanket. Vaguely, unrecognizingly then, for the first time, her
heavy eyes sensed the hotel proprietor's presence and worried their
way across the tearful ladies to Barton's harrowed face.

"Mother--was a rose," she began all over again. "Mother--was a rose.
Mother--was--a rose," she persisted babblingly. "And Father--g-guessed
it--from the very first! But as for me--?" Weakly she began to claw at
her incongruous bandage. "But--as--for me," she gasped, "the way I'm
fixed!--I have to--announce it!"

CHAPTER IV

The Edgartons did not start for Melbourne the following day! Nor the
next--nor the next--nor even the next.

In a head-bandage much more scientific than a blue-ribboned petticoat,
but infinitely less decorative, little Eve Edgarton lay imprisoned
among her hotel pillows.

Twice a day, and oftener if he could justify it, the village doctor
came to investigate pulse and temperature. Never before in all his
humdrum winter experience, or occasional summer-tourist vagary, had he
ever met any people who prated of camels instead of motor-cars, or
deprecated the dust of Abyssinia on their Piccadilly shoes, or sighed
indiscriminately for the snow-tinted breezes of the Klondike and
Ceylon. Never, either, in all his full round of experience had the
village doctor had a surgical patient as serenely complacent as little
Eve Edgarton, or any anxious relative as madly restive as little Eve
Edgarton's father.

For the first twenty-four hours, of course, Mr. Edgarton was much too
worried over the accident to his daughter to think for a moment of the
accident to his railway and steamship tickets. For the second
twenty-four hours he was very naturally so much concerned with the
readjustment of his railway and steamship tickets that he never