Starting to bow once more, he backed instead into the screen of the office window.  Without even an expletive he turned, pushed in the screen, clambered adroitly through the aperture, and disappeared almost instantly from sight.

Very faintly from some far up-stairs region the thin, faint, single syllable of a laugh came floating down into the piazza corner.

Then just as precipitous as a man steps into any other hole, Barton stepped into the conversational topic that had just been so aptly provided for him.

“Is your father something of a—­of a practical joker, Miss Edgarton?” he demanded with the slightest possible tinge of shrillness.

For the first time in Barton’s knowledge of little Eve Edgarton she lifted her eyes to him—­great hazel eyes, great bored, dreary, hazel eyes set broadly in a too narrow olive face.

“My father is generally conceded to be something of a joker, I believe,” she said dully.  “But it would never have occurred to me to call him a particularly practical one.  I don’t like him,” she added without a flicker of expression.

“I don’t either!” snapped Barton.

A trifle uneasily little Eve Edgarton went on.  “Why—­once when I was a tiny child—­” she droned.

“I don’t know anything about when you were a tiny child,” affirmed Barton with some vehemence.  “But just this afternoon—!”

In striking contrast to the cool placidity of her face one of Eve Edgarton’s boot-toes began to tap-tap-tap against the piazza floor.  When she lifted her eyes again to Barton their sleepy sullenness was shot through suddenly with an unmistakable flash of temper.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Mr. Barton!” she cried out.  “If you insist upon riding with me, couldn’t you please hurry?  The afternoons are so short!”

“If I ‘insist’ upon riding with you?” gasped Barton.

Disconcertingly from an upper window the Older Man’s face beamed suddenly down upon him.  “Oh, don’t mind anything she says,” drawled the Older Man.  “It’s just her cunning, ‘meek’ little ways.”

Precipitately Barton bolted for his room.

Once safely ensconced behind his closed door a dozen different decisions, a dozen different indecisions, rioted tempestuously through his mind.  To go was just as awkward as not to go!  Not to go was just as awkward as to go!  Over and over and over one silly alternative chased the other through his addled senses.  Then just as precipitately as he had bolted to his room he began suddenly to hurl himself into his riding-clothes, yanking out a bureau drawer here, slamming back a closet door there, rummaging through a box, tipping over a trunk, yet in all his fuming haste, his raging irritability, showing the same fastidious choice of shirt, tie, collar, that characterized his every public appearance.

Immaculate at last as a tailor’s equestrian advertisement he came striding down again into the hotel office, only to plunge most inopportunely into Miss Von Eaton’s languorous presence.