began to back away from them, bowing low all the time, very, very low, first to Barton, then to his daughter, then to Barton again. "I wish you both a very good afternoon!" he said. "Really, I see no reason why either of you should expect a single dull moment!" [Illustration: "I would therefore respectfully suggest as a special topic of conversation the consummate cheek of--yours truly, Paul Reymouth Edgarton"] Before the sickly grin on Barton's face his own smile deepened into actual unctuousness. But before the sudden woodeny set of his daughter's placid mouth his unctuousness twisted just a little bit wryly on his lips. "After all, my dear young people," he asserted hurriedly, "there's just one thing in the world, you know, that makes two people congenial, and that is--that they both shall have arrived at exactly the same conclusion--by two totally different routes. It's got to be exactly the same conclusion, else there isn't any sympathy in it. But it's got to be by two totally different routes, you understand, else there isn't any talky-talk to it!" Laboriously one eyebrow began to jerk its way up his forehead, and with a purely mechanical instinct he reached up drolly and pulled it down again. "So--as the initial test of your mutual congeniality this afternoon," he resumed, "I would therefore respectfully suggest as a special topic of conversation the consummate cheek of--yours truly, Paul Reymouth Edgarton!" 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