handy, won't it, if we have to be out
here all night, Mr. Barton?"

"If we have to be out here--all night?" faltered Barton.

Oh, ye gods! If just their afternoon ride together had been hotel
talk--as of course it was within five minutes after their
departure--what would their midnight return be? Or rather their
non-return? Already through his addled brain he heard the monotonous
creak-creak of rocking-chair gossip, the sly jest of the smoking-room,
the whispered excitement of the kitchen--all the sophisticated old
worldlings hoping indifferently for the best, all the unsophisticated
old prudes yearning ecstatically for the worst!

"If we have to stay out here all night?" he repeated wildly. "Oh,
what--oh, what will your father say, Miss Edgarton?"

"What will Father say?" drawled little Eve Edgarton. Thuddingly she
set down the empty beef-jar. "Oh, Father'll say: What in creation is
Eve out trying to save to-night? A dog? A cat? A three-legged deer?"

"Well, what do you expect to save?" quizzed Barton a bit tartly.

"Just--you," acknowledged little Eve Edgarton without enthusiasm. "And
isn't it funny," she confided placidly, "that I've never yet succeeded
in saving anything that I could take home with me--and keep! That's
the trouble with boarding!"

In a vague, gold-colored flicker of appeal her lifted face flared out
again into Barton's darkness. Too fugitive to be called a smile, a
tremor of reminiscence went scudding across her mouth before the
brooding shadow of her old slouch hat blotted out her features again.

"In India once," persisted the dreary little voice, "in India once,
when Father and I were going into the mountains for the summer, there
was a--there was a sort of fakir at one of the railway stations doing
tricks with a crippled tiger-cub--a tiger-cub with a shot-off paw. And
when Father wasn't looking I got off the train and went back--and I
followed that fakir two days till he just naturally had to sell me the
tiger-cub; he couldn't exactly have an Englishwoman following him
indefinitely, you know. And I took the tiger-cub back with me to
Father and he was very cunning--but--" Languorously the speech trailed
off into indistinctness. "But the people at the hotel were--were
indifferent to him," she rallied whisperingly. "And I had to let him
go."

"You got off a train? In India? Alone?" snapped Barton. "And went
following a dirty, sneaking fakir for two days? Well, of all the
crazy--indiscree