"Did you touch my hand on purpose, or just accidentally?" asked Eve Edgarton, without a flicker of expression on her upturned, gold-colored face. "Why, I'm sure I don't know," laughed Barton. "Maybe--maybe it was a little of each." With absolute gravity little Eve Edgarton kept right on staring at him. "I don't know whether I should ever specially like you--or not, Mr. Barton," she drawled. "But you are certainly very beautiful!" "Oh, I say!" cried Barton wretchedly. With a really desperate effort he struggled almost to his feet, tottered for an instant, and then came sagging down to the soft earth again--a great, sprawling, spineless heap, at little Eve Edgarton's feet. Unflinchingly, as if her wrists were built of steel wires, the girl jumped up and pulled and tugged and yanked his almost dead weight into a sitting posture again. "My! But you're chock-full of lightning!" she commiserated with him. Out of the utter rage and mortification of his helplessness Barton could almost have cursed her for her sympathy. Then suddenly, without warning, a little gasp of sheer tenderness escaped him. "Eve Edgarton," he stammered, "you're--a--brick! You--you must have been invented just for the sole purpose of saving people's lives. Oh, you've saved mine all right!" he acknowledged soberly. "And all this black, blasted night you've nursed me--and fed me--and jollied me--without a whimper about yourself--without--a--" Impulsively he reached out his numb-palmed hand to her, and her own hand came so cold to it that it might have been the caress of one ghost to another. "Eve Edgarton," he reiterated, "I tell you--you're a brick! And I'm a fool--and a slob--and a mutt-head--even when I'm not chock-full of lightning, as you call it! But if there's ever anything I can do for you!" "What did you say?" muttered little Eve Edgarton. "I said you were a brick!" repeated Barton a bit irritably. "Oh, no, I didn't mean--that," mused the girl. "But what was the--last thing you said?" "Oh!" grinned Barton more cheerfully. "I said--if there was ever anything that I could do for you, anything--" "Would you rent me your attic?" asked little Eve Edgarton. "Would I rent you my attic?" stammered Barton. "Why in the world should you want to hire my attic?"