“What?” gasped Barton.

Very gingerly he took the pulpy sheet between his thumb and forefinger.  It was a full-page picture of a big gas-range, and slowly, as he scanned it for some hidden charm or value, it split in two and fell soggily back to its mates.  Once again for sheer nervous relief he burst out laughing.

Out of her diminutiveness, out of her leanness, out of her extraordinary litheness, little Eve Edgarton stared up speculatively at Barton’s great hulking helplessness.  Her hat looked humorous.  Her hair looked humorous.  Her tattered flannel shirt was distinctly humorous.  But there was nothing humorous about her set little mouth.

“If you—­laugh,” she threatened, “I’ll tip you over backward again—­and—­trample on you.”

“I believe you would!” said Barton with a sudden sobriety more packed with mirth than any laugh he had ever laughed.

“Well, I don’t care,” conceded the girl a bit sheepishly.  “Everybody laughs at my paper-doll book!  Father does!  Everybody does!  When I’m rearranging their old mummy collections—­and cataloguing their old South American birds—­or shining up their old geological specimens—­they think I’m wonderful.  But when I try to do the teeniest—­tiniest thing that happens to interest me—­they call me ‘crazy’!  So that’s why I come ’way out here to this cave—­to play,” she whispered with a flicker of real shyness.  “In all the world,” she confided, “this cave is the only place I’ve ever found where there wasn’t anybody to laugh at me.”

Between her placid brows a vindictive little frown blackened suddenly.  “That’s why it wasn’t specially convenient, Mr. Barton—­to have you ride with me this afternoon,” she affirmed.  “That’s why it wasn’t specially convenient to—­to have you struck by lightning this afternoon!” Tragically, with one small brown hand, she pointed toward the great water-soaked mess of magazines that surrounded her.  “You see,” she mourned, “I’ve been saving them up all summer—­to cut out—­to-day!  And now?—­Now—?  We’re sailing for Melbourne Saturday!” she added conclusively.

“Well—­really!” stammered Barton.  “Well—­truly!—­Well, of all—­damned things!  Why—­what do you want me to do?  Apologize to you for having been struck by lightning?” His voice was fairly riotous with astonishment and indignation.  Then quite unexpectedly one side of his mouth began to twist upward in the faintest perceptible sort of a real grin.

“When you smile like that you’re—­quite pleasant,” murmured little Eve Edgarton.

“Is that so?” grinned Barton.  “Well, it wouldn’t hurt you to smile just a tiny bit now and then!”

“Wouldn’t it?” said little Eve Edgarton.  Thoughtfully for a moment, with her scissors poised high in the air, she seemed to be considering the suggestion.  Then quite abruptly again she resumed her task of prying some pasted object out of her scrap-book.  “Oh, no, thank you, Mr. Barton,” she decided.  “I’m much too bored—­all the while—­to do any smiling.”