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