"Oh--all right," crooned little Eve Edgarton. Expeditiously Barton turned to another page, and another, and another. Wryly he tasted strange sentence after strange sentence. Then suddenly his whole wonderful face wreathed itself in smiles again. "Three superfamilies of turtles," he began joyously. "Turtles! Ha!--I know turtles!" he proceeded with real triumph. "Why, that's the first word I've recognized in all this--this--er--this what I've been reading! Sure I know turtles!" he reiterated with increasing conviction. "Why, sure! Those--those slow-crawling, box-like affairs that--live in the mud and are used for soup and--er--combs," he continued blithely. "The--very--same," nodded little Eve Edgarton soberly. "Oh--Lordy!" groaned her father from the window. "Oh, this is going to be lots better!" beamed Barton. "Now that I know what it's all about--" "For goodness' sake," growled Edgarton from his table, "how do you people think I'm going to do any work with all this jabbering going on!" Hesitatingly for a moment Barton glanced back over his shoulder at Edgarton, and then turned round again to probe Eve's preferences in the matter. As sluggishly determinate as two black turtles trailing along a white sand beach, her great dark eyes in her little pale face seemed headed suddenly toward some Far-Away Idea. "Oh--go right on reading, Mr. Barton," nodded little Eve Edgarton. "Three superfamilies of turtles," began Barton all over again. "Three superfamilies of turtles--the--the Amphichelydia, the Cryptodira, and the Tri--the--Tri--the T-r-i-o-n-y-c-h-o-i-d-e-a," he spelled out laboriously. With a vicious jerk of his chair Edgarton snatched up his papers and his orchids and started for the door. [Illustration: "You're nice," he said. "I like you!"] "When you people get all through this nonsense," he announced,