“After a while, of course, I think you might stop,” suggested Barton a bit creepishly.

Again the big eyes opened at him with distinct surprise.  “Why—­why?” said Eve Edgarton.  “It—­never stops!”

“Oh, I say,” frowned Barton, “I do feel awfully badly about your going away off to a place like that to live!  Really!” he stammered.

“We’re going—­Thursday,” said little Eve Edgarton.

“Thursday?” cried Barton.  For some inexplainable reason the whole idea struck him suddenly as offensive, distinctly offensive, as if Fate, the impatient waiter, had snatched away a yet untasted plate.  “Why—­why, Eve!” he protested, “why, we’re only just beginning to get acquainted.”

“Yes, I know it,” mused little Eve Edgarton.

“Why—­if we’d have had half a chance—­” began Barton, and then didn’t know at all how to finish it.  “Why, you’re so plucky—­and so odd—­and so interesting!” he began all over again.  “Oh, of course, I’m an awful duffer and all that!  But if we’d had half a chance, I say, you and I would have been great pals in another fortnight!”

“Even so,” murmured little Eve Edgarton, “there are yet—­fifty-two hours before I go.”

“What are fifty-two hours?” laughed Barton.

Listlessly like a wilting flower little Eve Edgarton slid down a trifle farther into her pillows.  “If you’d have an early supper,” she whispered, “and then come right up here afterward, why, there would be two or three hours.  And then to-morrow if you got up quite early, there would be a long, long morning, and—­we—­could get acquainted—­some,” she insisted.

“Why, Eve!” said Barton, “do you really mean that you would like to be friends with me?”

“Yes—­I do,” nodded the crown of the white-bandaged head.

“But I’m so stupid,” confided Barton, with astonishing humility.  “All these botany things—­and geology—­and—­”

“Yes, I know it,” mumbled little Eve Edgarton.  “That’s what makes you so restful.”

“What?” queried Barton a bit sharply.  Then very absent-mindedly for a moment he sat staring off into space through a gray, pungent haze of cigarette smoke.

“Eve,” he ventured at last.

“What?” mumbled little Eve Edgarton.

“Nothing,” said Barton.

“Mr. Jim Barton,” ventured Eve.

“What?” asked Barton.

“Nothing,” mumbled little Eve Edgarton.

Out of some emotional or purely social tensities of life it seems rather that Time strikes the clock than that anything so small as a clock should dare strike the Time.  One—­two—­three—­four—­five! winced the poor little frightened traveling-clock on the mantelpiece.

Then quite abruptly little Eve Edgarton emerged from her cozy cushions, sitting bolt upright like a doughty little warrior.