"Why--why, yes--I shouldn't wonder," admitted her father. "And reddish?" persisted little Eve Edgarton. "And longish? As long as--?" Illustratively with her hands she stretched to her full arm's length. "Yes, I think perhaps it is reddish," conceded her father. "But why?" "Oh--nothing," mused little Eve Edgarton. "Only sometimes at night I dream about you and me landing at Nunko-Nono. And John in a great big, long, reddish-gray beard always comes crunching down at full speed across the hermit-crabs to meet us. And always just before he reaches us, he--he trips on his beard--and falls headlong into the ocean--and is--drowned." "Why--what an awful dream!" deprecated her father. "Awful?" queried little Eve Edgarton. "Ha! It makes me--laugh. All the same," she affirmed definitely, "good old John Ellbertson will have to have his beard cut." Quizzically for an instant she stared off into space, then quite abruptly she gave a quick, funny little sniff. "Anyway, I'll have a garden, won't I?" she said. "And always, of course, there will be--Henrietta." "Henrietta?" frowned her father. "My daughter!" explained little Eve Edgarton with dignity. "Your daughter?" snapped Edgarton. "Oh, of course there may be several," conceded little Eve Edgarton. "But Henrietta, I'm almost positive, will be the best one!" So jerkily she thrust her slender throat forward with the speech, her whole facial expression seemed suddenly to have undercut and stunned her father's. "Always, Father," she attested grimly, "with your horrid old books and specimens you have crowded my dolls out of my steamer trunk. But never once--" her tightening lips hastened to assure him, "have you ever succeeded in crowding--Henrietta--and the others out of my mind!" Quite incongruously, then, with a soft little hand in which there lurked no animosity whatsoever, she reached up suddenly and smoothed the astonishment out of her father's mouth-lines. "After all, Father," she asked, "now that we're really talking so intimately, after all--there isn't so specially much to life anyway, is there, except just the satisfaction of making the complete round of human experience--once for yourself--and then once again--to show another person? Just that double chance, Father, of getting two original glimpses at happiness? One through your own eyes, and one--just a little bit dimmer--through the eyes of another?" With mercilessly appraising vision the starving Youth that was in her glared up at the satiate Age in him.