Little Eve Edgarton | Page 6

is my daughter!"
Listlessly the girl came forward and proffered her hand to the Younger Man. It was a very little hand. More than that, it was an exceedingly cold little hand.
"How do you do, sir?" she murmured almost inaudibly.
With an expression of ineffable joy the Older Man reached out and tapped his daughter on the shoulder.
"It has just transpired, my dear Eve," he beamed, "that you can do this young man here an inestimable service--tell him something--teach him something, I mean--that he very specially needs to know!"
As one fairly teeming with benevolence he stood there smiling blandly into Barton's astonished face. "Next to the pleasure of bringing together two people who like each other," he persisted, "I know of nothing more poignantly diverting than the bringing together of people who--who--" Mockingly across his daughter's unconscious head, malevolently through his mask of utter guilelessness and peace, he challenged Barton's staring helplessness. "So--taken all in all," he drawled still beamingly, "there's nothing in the world--at this particular moment, Mr. Barton--that could amuse me more than to have you join my daughter in her ride this afternoon!"
"Ride with me?" gasped little Eve Edgarton.
"This afternoon?" floundered Barton.
"Oh--why--yes--of course! I'd be delighted! I'd be--be! Only--! Only I'm afraid that--!"
Deprecatingly with uplifted hand the Older Man refuted every protest. "No, indeed, Mr. Barton," he insisted. "Oh, no--no indeed--I assure you it won't inconvenience my daughter in the slightest! My daughter is very obliging! My daughter, indeed--if I may say so in all modesty--my daughter indeed is always a good deal of a--philanthropist!"
Then very grandiloquently, like a man in an old-fashioned picture, he 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 call him a particularly practical one. I don't like him," she added without a flicker of expression.
"I don't either!" snapped Barton.
A trifle uneasily little Eve Edgarton went on. "Why--once when I was a tiny child--" she droned.
"I don't know anything about when you were a tiny child," affirmed Barton with some vehemence. "But just this afternoon--!"
In striking contrast to the cool placidity of her face one of Eve Edgarton's boot-toes began to tap-tap-tap against the piazza floor. When she lifted her eyes again to Barton their sleepy sullenness was shot through suddenly with an unmistakable flash of temper.
"Oh, for Heaven's sake, Mr. Barton!" she cried out. "If you insist upon riding with me, couldn't you please hurry? The afternoons are so short!"
"If I 'insist' upon riding with you?" gasped Barton.
Disconcertingly from an upper window the Older Man's face beamed suddenly down upon him. "Oh, don't mind