“A party?” she drawled.  “A—­a—­dancing party—­you mean?  A real—­Christian—­dancing party?”

Dully the big eyes drooped again, and as if in mere casual mannerism her little brown hands went creeping up to the white breast of her gown.  Then just as startling, just-as unprovable as the flash of a shooting star, her glance flashed up at Barton.

“O—­h!” gasped little Eve Edgarton.

“O—­h!” said Barton.

Astoundingly in his ears bells seemed suddenly to be ringing.  His head was awhirl, his pulses fairly pounding with the weird, quixotic purport of his impulse.

“Miss Edgarton,” he began.  “Miss—­”

Then right behind him two older men joggled him awkwardly in passing.

“—­and that Miss Von Eaton,” chuckled one man to another.  “Lordy!  There’ll be more than forty men after her for to-morrow night!  Smith!  Arnold!  Hudson!  Hazeltine!  Who are you betting will get her?”

“I’m betting that I will!” crashed every brutally competitive male instinct in Barton’s body.  Impetuously he broke away from the Edgartons and darted off to find Miss Von Eaton before “Smith—­Arnold—­Hudson—­Hazeltine”—­or any other man should find her!

So he sent little Eve Edgarton a great, gorgeous box of candy instead, wonderful candy, pounds and pounds of it, fine, fluted chocolates, and rose-pink bonbons, and fat, sugared violets, and all sorts of tin-foiled mysteries of fruit and spice.

And when the night of the party came he strutted triumphantly to it with Helene Von Eaton, who already at twenty was beginning to be just a little bit bored with parties; and together through all that riot of music and flowers and rainbow colors and dazzling lights they trotted and tangoed with monotonous perfection—­the envied and admired of all beholders; two superbly physical young specimens of manhood and womanhood, desperately condoning each other’s dullnesses for the sake of each other’s good looks.

And while Youth and its Laughter—­a chaos of color and shrill crescendos—­was surging back and forth across the flower-wreathed piazzas, and violins were wheedling, and Japanese lanterns drunk with candle light were bobbing gaily in the balsam-scented breeze, little Eve Edgarton, up-stairs in her own room, was kneeling crampishly on the floor by the open window, with her chin on the window-sill, staring quizzically down—­down—­down on all that joy and novelty, till her father called her a trifle impatiently at last from his microscope table on the other side of the room.

“Eve!” summoned her father.  “What an idler you are!  Can’t you see how worried I am over this specimen here?  My eyes, I tell you, aren’t what they used to be.”

Then, patiently, little Eve Edgarton scrambled to her feet and, crossing over to her father’s table, pushed his head mechanically aside and, bending down, squinted her own eye close to his magnifying glass.