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.

For the first twenty-four hours, of course, Mr. Edgarton was much too
worried over the accident to his daughter to think for a moment of the
accident to his railway and steamship tickets. For the second
twenty-four hours he was very naturally so much concerned with the
readjustment of his railway and steamship tickets that he never