“Mr. Jim Barton!” said little Eve Edgarton.  “If I stayed here two weeks longer—­I know you’d like me!  I know it!  I just know it!” Quizzically for an instant, as if to accumulate further courage, she cocked her little head on one side and stared blankly into Barton’s astonished eyes.  “But you see I’m not going to be here two weeks!” she resumed hurriedly.  Again the little head cocked appealingly to one side.  “You—­you wouldn’t be willing to take my word for it, would you?  And like me—­now?”

“Why—­why, what do you mean?” stammered Barton.

“What do I mean?” quizzed little Eve Edgarton.  “Why, I mean—­that just once before I go off to Nunko-Nono—­I’d like to be—­attractive!”

“Attractive?” stammered Barton helplessly.

With all the desperate, indomitable frankness of a child, the girl’s chin thrust itself forward.

“I could be attractive!” she said.  “I could!  I know I could!  If I’d ever let go just the teeniest—­tiniest bit—­I could have—­beaux!” she asserted triumphantly.  “A thousand beaux!” she added more explicitly.  “Only—­”

“Only what?” laughed Barton.

“Only one doesn’t let go,” said little Eve Edgarton.

“Why not?” persisted Barton.

“Why, you just—­couldn’t—­with strangers,” said little Eve Edgarton.  “That’s the bewitchment of it.”

“The bewitchment?” puzzled Barton.

Nervously the girl crossed her hands in her lap.  She suddenly didn’t look like a doughty little soldier any more, but just like a worried little girl.

“Did you ever read any fairy stories?” she asked with apparent irrelevance.

“Why, of course,” said Barton.  “Millions of them when I was a kid.”

“I read one—­once,” said little Eve Edgarton.  “It was about a person, a sleeping person, a lady, I mean, who couldn’t wake up until a prince kissed her.  Well, that was all right, of course,” conceded little Eve Edgarton, “because, of course, any prince would have been willing to kiss the lady just as a mere matter of accommodation.  But suppose,” fretted little Eve Edgarton, “suppose the bewitchment also ran that no prince would kiss the lady until she had waked up?  Now there!” said little Eve Edgarton, “is a situation that I should call completely stalled.”

“But what’s all this got to do with you?” grinned Barton.

“Nothing at all to do with me!” said little Eve Edgarton.  “It is me!  That’s just exactly the way I’m fixed.  I can’t be attractive—­out loud—­until some one likes me!  But no one, of course, will ever like me until I am already attractive—­out loud!  So that’s why I wondered,” she said, “if just as a mere matter of accommodation, you wouldn’t be willing to be friends with me now?  So that for at least the fifty-two hours that remain, I could be released—­from my most unhappy enchantment.”

Astonishingly across that frank, perfectly outspoken little face, the frightened eyelashes came flickering suddenly down.  “Because,” whispered little Eve Edgarton, “because—­you see—­I happen to like you already.”