Part 13 (1/2)

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 steams.h.i.+p tickets. For the second twenty-four hours he was very naturally so much concerned with the readjustment of his railway and steams.h.i.+p tickets that he never concerned himself at all with the accident to his plans. But by the end of the third twenty-four hours, with his first two worries reasonably eliminated, it was the accident to his plans that smote upon him with the fiercest poignancy. Let a man's clothes and togs vacillate as they will between his trunk and his bureau--once that man's spirit is packed for a journey nothing but journey's end can ever unpack it again!

With his own heart tuned already to the heart-throb of an engine, his pale eyes focused squintingly toward expected novelties, his thin nostrils half a-sniff with the first salty scent of the Far-Away, Mr.

Edgarton, whatever his intentions, was not the most ideal of sick-room companions. Too conscientious to leave his daughter, too unhappy to stay with her, he spent the larger part of his days and nights pacing up and down like a caged beast between the two bedrooms.

It was not till the fifth day, however, that his impatience actually burst the bounds he had set for it. Somewhere between his maple bureau and Eve's mahogany bed the actual explosion took place, and in that explosion every single infinitesimal wrinkle of brow, cheek, chin, nose, was called into play, as if here at last was a man who intended once and for all time to wring his face perfectly dry of all human expression.

”Eve!” hissed her father. ”I hate this place! I loathe this place! I abominate it! I despise it! The flora is--execrable! The fauna? Nil!

And as to the coffee--the breakfast coffee? Oh, ye G.o.ds! Eve, if we're delayed here another week--I shall die! Die, mind you, at sixty-two!

With my life-work just begun, Eve! I hate this place! I abominate it!

I de--”

”Really?” mused little Eve Edgarton from her white pillows. ”Why--I think it's lovely.”

”Eh?” demanded her father. ”What? Eh?”

”It's so social,” said little Eve Edgarton.

”Social?” choked her father.

As bereft of expression as if robbed of both inner and outer vision, little Eve Edgarton lifted her eyes to his. ”Why--two of the hotel ladies have almost been to see me,” she confided listlessly. ”And the chambermaid brought me the picture of her beau. And the hotel proprietor lent me a story-book. And Mr.--”

”Social?” snapped her father.

”Oh, of course--if you got killed in a fire or anything, saving people's lives, you'd sort of expect them to--send you candy--or make you some sort of a memorial,” conceded little Eve Edgarton unemotionally. ”But when you break 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.