"Eve!" he demanded. "Surely you're not blaming me any in your heart because I want to see you safely married and settled with--with John Ellbertson?" Vaguely, like a child repeating a dimly understood lesson, little Eve Edgarton repeated the phrases after him. "Oh, no, Father," she said, "I surely am not blaming you--in my heart--for wanting to see me married and settled with--John Ellbertson. Good old John Ellbertson," she corrected painstakingly. With his hand still holding her little chin like a vise, the man's eyes narrowed to his further probing. "Eve," he frowned, "I'm not as well as I used to be! I've got pains in my arms! And they're not good pains! I shall live to be a thousand! But I--I might not! It's a--rotten world, Eve," he brooded, "and quite unnecessarily crowded--it seems to me--with essentially rotten people. Toward the starving and the crippled and the hideously distorted, the world, having no envy of them, shows always an amazing mercy; and Beauty, whatever its sorrows, can always retreat to the thick protecting wall of its own conceit. But as for the rest of us?" he grinned with a sudden convulsive twist of the eyebrow, "God help the unduly prosperous--and the merely plain! From the former--always, Envy, like a wolf, shall tear down every fresh talent, every fresh treasure, they lift to their aching backs. And from the latter--Brutal Neglect shall ravage away even the charm that they thought they had! "It's a--a rotten world, Eve, I tell you," he began all over again, a bit plaintively. "A rotten world! And the pains in my arms, I tell you, are not--nice! Distinctly not nice! Sometimes, Eve, you think I'm making faces at you! But, believe me, it isn't faces that I'm making! It's my--heart that I'm making at you! And believe me, the pain is not--nice!" Before the sudden wince in his daughter's eyes he reverted instantly to an air of semi-jocosity. "So, under all existing circumstances, little girl," he hastened to affirm, "you can hardly blame a crusty old codger of a father for preferring to leave his daughter in the hands of a man whom he positively knows to be good, than in the hands of some casual stranger who, just in a negative way, he merely can't prove isn't good? Oh, Eve--Eve," he pleaded sharply, "you'll be so much better off--out of the world! You've got infinitely too much money and infinitely too little--self-conceit--to be happy here! They would break your heart in a year! But at Nunko-Nono!" he cried eagerly. "Oh, Eve! Think of the peace of it! Just white beach, and a blue sea, and the long, low, endless horizon. And John will make you a garden! And women--I have often heard--are very happy in a garden! And--" Slowly little Eve Edgarton lifted her eyes again to his. "Has John got a beard?" she asked. "Why--why, I'm sure I don't remember," stammered her father. "Why, yes, I think so--why, yes, indeed--I dare say!" "Is it a grayish beard?" asked little Eve Edgarton.