eak your head--just amusing yourself?
Why, I thought it was nice for the hotel ladies to almost come to see
me," she finished, without even so much as a flicker of the eyelids.

Disgustedly her father started for his own room, then whirled abruptly
in his tracks and glanced back at that imperturbable little figure in
the big white bed. Except for the scarcely perceptible hound-like
flicker of his nostrils, his own face held not a whit more expression
than the girl's.

"Eve," he asked casually, "Eve, you're not changing your mind, are
you, about Nunko-Nono? And John Ellbertson? Good old John Ellbertson,"
he repeated feelingly. "Eve!" he quickened with sudden sharpness.
"Surely nothing has happened to make you change your mind about
Nunko-Nono? And good old John Ellbertson?"

"Oh--no--Father," said little Eve Edgarton. Indolently she withdrew
her eyes from her father's and stared off Nunko-Nonoward--in a hazy,
geographical sort of a dream. "Good old John Ellbertson--good old John
Ellbertson," she began to croon very softly to herself. "Good old
John Ellbertson. How I do love his kind brown eyes--how I do--"

"Brown eyes?" snapped her father. "Brown? John Ellbertson's got the
grayest eyes that I ever saw in my life!"

Without the slightest ruffle of composure little Eve Edgarton accepted
the correction. "Oh, has he?" she conceded amiably. "Well, then, good
old John Ellbertson--good old John Ellbertson--how I do love his
kind--gray eyes," she began all over again.

Palpably Edgarton shifted his standing weight from one foot to the
other. "I understood--your mother," he asserted a bit defiantly.

"Did you, dear? I wonder?" mused little Eve Edgarton.

"Eh?" jerked her father.

Still with the vague geographical dream in her eyes, little Eve
Edgarton pointed off suddenly toward the open lid of her steamer
trunk.

"Oh--my manuscript notes, Father, please!" she ordered almost
peremptorily, "John's notes, you know? I might as well be working on
them while I'm lying here."

Obediently from the tousled top of the steamer trunk her father
returned with the great batch of rough manuscript. "And my pencil,
please," persisted little Eve Edgarton. "And my eraser. And my
writing-board. And my ruler. And my--"

Absent-mindedly, one by one, Edgarton handed the articles to her, and
then sank down on the foot of her bed with his thin-lipped mouth
contorted into a rather mirthless grin. "Don't care much for your old
father, do