“What a sight you are to—­meet my father?” repeated Eve Edgarton with astonishment.  “Oh, please don’t insist on waking up Father,” she begged.  “He hates so to be waked up.  Oh, of course if I’d been hurt it would have been courteous of you to tell him,” she explained seriously.  “But, oh, I’m sure he wouldn’t like your waking him up just to tell him that you got hurt!”

Softly under her breath she began to whistle toward a shadow in the stable-yard.  “Usually,” she whispered, “there’s a sleepy stable-boy lying round here somewhere.  Oh—­Bob!” she summoned.

Rollingly the shadow named “Bob” struggled to its very real feet.

“Here, Bob!” she ordered.  “Come help Mr. Barton.  He’s pretty badly off.  We got sort of struck by lightning.  And two of us—­got killed.  Go help him up-stairs.  Do anything he wants.  But don’t make any fuss.  He’ll be all right in the morning.”

Gravely she put out her hand to Barton, and nodded to the boy.

“Good night!” she said.  “And good night, Bob!”

Shrewdly for a moment she stood watching them out of sight, shivered a little at the clatter of a box kicked over in some remote shed, and then swinging round quickly, ripped the hot saddle from the big gray’s back, slipped the bit from his tortured tongue, and, turning him loose with one sharp slap on his gleaming flank, yanked off her own riding-boots and went scudding off in her stocking-feet through innumerable doors and else till, reaching the great empty office, she caromed off suddenly up three flights of stairs to her own apartment.

Once in her room her little traveling-clock told her it was a quarter of three.

“Whew!” she said.  Just “Whew!” Very furiously at the big porcelain washbowl she began to splash and splash and splash.  “If I’ve got to make four hundred muffins,” she said, “I surely have got to be whiter than snow!”

Roused by the racket, her father came irritably and stood in the doorway.

“Oh, my dear Eve!” he complained, “didn’t you get wet enough in the storm?  And for mercy’s sake where have you been?”

Out of the depths of her dripping hair and her big plushy bath-towel little Eve Edgarton considered her father only casually.

[Illustration:  “Don’t delay me!” she said, “I’ve got to make four hundred muffins.”]

“Don’t delay me!” she said, “I’ve got to make four hundred muffins!  And I’m so late I haven’t even time to change my clothes!  We got struck by lightning,” she added purely incidentally.  “That is—­sort of struck by lightning.  That is, Mr. Barton got sort of struck by lightning.  And oh, glory, Father!” her voice kindled a little.  “And, oh, glory, Father, I thought he was gone!  Twice in the hours I was working over him he stopped breathing altogether!”

Palpably the vigor died out of her voice again.  “Father,” she drawled mumblingly through intermittent flops of bath-towel; “Father—­you said I could keep the next thing I—­saved.  Do you think I could—­keep him?”