Barton, as dumb as the father, carried the girl directly to the bed and put her down softly, half lying, half sitting, among the great pile of night-crumpled pillows. Some one threw a blanket over her. And above the top edge of that blanket nothing of her showed except the grotesquely twisted turban, the whole of one white eyelid, the half of the other, and just that single persistent trickle of red. Raspishly at that moment the clock on the mantelpiece choked out the hour of three. Already Dawn was more than half a hint in the sky, and in the ghastly mixture of real and artificial light the girl's doom looked already sealed. Then very suddenly she opened her eyes and stared around. "Eve!" gasped her father, "what have you been doing?" Vaguely the troubled eyes closed, and then opened again. "I was--trying--to show people--that I was a--rose," mumbled little Eve Edgarton. Swiftly her father came running to her side. He thought it was her deathbed statement. "But Eve?" he pleaded. "Why, my own little girl. Why, my--" Laboriously the big eyes lifted to his. "Mother was a rose," persisted the stricken lips desperately. "Yes, I know," sobbed her father. "But--but--" "But--nothing," mumbled little Eve Edgarton. With an almost superhuman effort she pushed her sharp little chin across the confining edge of the blanket. Vaguely, unrecognizingly then, for the first time, her heavy eyes sensed the hotel proprietor's presence and worried their way across the tearful ladies to Barton's harrowed face. "Mother--was a rose," she began all over again. "Mother--was a rose. Mother--was--a rose," she persisted babblingly. "And Father--g-guessed it--from the very first! But as for me--?" Weakly she began to claw at her incongruous bandage. "But--as--for me," she gasped, "the way I'm fixed!--I have to--announce it!" CHAPTER IV The Edgartons did not start for Melbourne the following day! Nor the next--nor the next--nor even the next. In a head-bandage much more scientific than a blue-ribboned petticoat, but infinitely less decorative, little Eve Edgarton lay imprisoned among her hotel pillows. Twice a day, and oftener if he could justify it, the village doctor came to investigate pulse and temperature. Never before in all his humdrum winter experience, or occasional summer-tourist vagary, had he ever met any people who prated of camels instead of motor-cars, or deprecated the dust of Abyssinia on their Piccadilly shoes, or sighed indiscriminately for the snow-tinted breezes of the Klondike and Ceylon. Never, either, in all his full round of experience had the village doctor had a surgical patient as serenely complacent as little Eve Edgarton, or any anxious relative as madly restive as little Eve Edgarton's father.