PART I

OLD-DAD

UNTIL Daphne Bretton's peremptory departure from college she had neither known nor liked her father well enough to distinguish him with a nick name. But on that momentous day in question, when blurting into the problematical presence of an unfamiliar parent in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar city she flung her unhappy news across his book-cluttered desk, the appellation slipped from her stark lips as though it were the only fluid phrase in a wooden-throated world.

"Old-Dad!" she said, "I have been expelled from college!"

From under the incongruous thatch of his snow-white hair her young father lifted his extraordinarily young face with a snarl like the snarl of a startled animal.

"Why?--Why Daphne!" he gasped. "_What?_" [2]

With her small gloved hand fumbling desperately at the great muffly collar of her coat the young girl repeated her statement.

"I--I have been expelled from college!" she said.

"Yes, but Daphne!--What for?" demanded her father. His own face was suddenly as white as hers, his lips as stark. "What for?" he persisted.

Twice the young girl's lips opened and shut in an utter agony of inarticulation. Then quite sharply the blonde head lifted, the shoulders squared, and the whole slender, quivering little body braced itself to meet the traditional blow of the traditional Avenger.

"For--for having a boy in my room--at night," said the girl.

Before the dumb, abject misery in the young blue eyes that lifted so heavily to his, a grin like the painted grin on a sick clown's face shot suddenly across the father's mobile mouth.

"Oh I hope he was a nice boy!" he said quite abruptly. "Blonde or brunette?"

"Why--Why--Father!" stammered the [3] girl. "I--I thought you would--would kill me!"

"Kill you?" mumbled her father. More essentially at the moment he seemed concerned with an overturned bottle of ink that was splashing its sinister pool across his morning's work. "Kill you?" he repeated vaguely. Across the high, intervening barrier of books and catalogues he craned his neck suddenly with a certain sharp intentness.

"And is your shoulder broken, too?" he asked very gently.

"My shoulder?" quivered the girl.

"It sags so," murmured her father.

"It's my suit-case," said the girl. "My heavy suit-case."

"Why not put it down?" asked the man.

Across the young girl's fluctuant face a dozen new miseries flared hotly.

"I didn't--just know--whether you'd want me to put it down," she said.

"You've come home, haven't you?" questioned the man. "Home is supposed to be where your father is, isn't it?"

"It never has been," said the girl quite simply. [4]

Like a clash of swords the man's eyes smote across the girl's and the girl's across the man's. The ironic grin was still twisting wryly at one corner of the man's mouth but under the mocking fend of his narrowing eye lids a glisten of tears showed suddenly.

"Oh--Father," rallied the girl. "They called me an evil name! They----" With a gesture of ultimate bewilderment and despair she took a single step towards him. "Oh, Father," she gasped. "_What_ is it about boys that makes it so wicked to have them around?" And pitched over headlong in a dead faint at his feet.

When blackness turned into whiteness again she found herself lying limply in the big Oxford chair before the fire with a slate-colored hound sniffing rather interrogatively at her finger-tips and the strange man whom she had called "father" leaning casually with one elbow on the mantel-piece while he stood staring down at her through a great, sweet, foggy blur of cigarette smoke.

"Wh--what is the blue dog's name?" she asked a bit vaguely.

"Creep-Mouse," said the man. [5]

"I'm--I'm glad there's a dog," she whispered.

"So it's all right now, is it?" smiled the man. The smile was all in his eyes now and frankly mechanical still--a faint flare of mirth through a quizzical fretwork of pain.

"Yes, it's all right--now," said the girl, "unless of course----" Edging weakly forward to the front of the chair she clutched out gropingly for its cool, creaking straw arms and straightened up suddenly very stiff and tense. "Aren't you even going to ask me," she faltered, "what the boy was doing in my room--at night?"

"Oh, of course, I'm only human," admitted her father. Very leisurely as he spoke he stopped to light a fresh cigarette and stood for a moment blowing innumerable rings of smoke into space. "Only somehow--that's a matter," he smiled, "that I'd rather hear directly from the boy himself!"

"From the boy himself?" stammered the girl. With her slender, silken-shod limbs, the short skirt of the day, the simple blouse, the tousled hair, she looked for all the world like [6] a little child just jumping up to play. "Why--why he's here now!" she said.

"Here _now?_" cried her father. "Where?"

"Downstairs," said the girl. "We came on together."

"Came on together?" demanded her father. "From college, you mean? Two days and a night?"

"Yes," said the girl.

With a sharp intake of his breath that might have meant anything the man stepped suddenly forward.

Towering to her own little height the girl stood staunchly to meet him.

"Why you don't think for one single moment that--that it was fun, do you?" she questioned whitely. "You don't think for one single solitary little moment that I wanted him to come, do you? Or that there was anything very specially amusing for him in the coming?" Whiter and whiter the little face lifted. "It was only that he said I couldn't come alone to--to face whatever had to be faced. And if he came first he said it would seem like telling tales on me instead of on himself. So----" [7]

"Go and get him!" said her father quite sharply.

With unquestioning obedience the girl started for the door. Half way across the rug she stopped and swung round squarely.

"He will say it was all his fault," she said. "But it wasn't! I--I sort of dared him to do it!"

"Just a minute!" called her father. "When you come back with him----"

"Am I to come back with him?" protested the girl.

"When you come back with him----" repeated her father, "if I ask him to be seated you may leave the room at once--at once, you understand? But if I shouldn't ask him to sit down----"

"Then I am to stay and--see it through?" shivered the girl.

"Then you are to stay and see it through," said her father.

With a little soft thud the door shut between them.

When it opened again the man was still standing by the fireplace blowing gray smoke into space. With a casualness that savored [8] almost of affectation he stopped to light another cigarette before glancing up half askance to greet the hesitant footstep on the threshold.

"Why, come in!" he ordered.

Without further parleying the two young people appeared before him.

In the five minutes of her absence the young girl seemed to have grown younger, smaller, infinitely more broken even than her father had remembered her. But almost any girl would have looked unduly frail perhaps before the superbly handsome and altogether stalwart young athlete who loomed up so definitely beside her.

As though his daughter suddenly had ceased to exist the father's glance narrowed sharply towards the boy's clean young figure--the eager, worried eyes--the sensitive nostril--the grimly resolute young mouth, and in that glance a gasp that might have meant anything slipped through his own lips.

"You're--you're a keen looking lad!" he said. "But I think I could lick you at tennis!"

"Sir?" faltered the boy.

Quizzically but not unkindly the man [9] resumed his stare. "I don't think I happen to have heard your name," he affirmed with some abruptness.

"Wiltoner," said the boy. "Richard Wiltoner."

"Sit down, Richard," said the man.

Like some tortured creature at bay the boy turned sharply to the window and back towards the door again.

"No, I thank you, Sir!" he protested. "I simply couldn't sit down!" Restively he crossed to the bookcase and swung around with a jerk to rake his impatient eyes across the girl's lingering presence. "Maybe I'll never sit down again!" he said.

"Nor eat?" drawled the older man. "Nor--sleep?"

"Nor eat, nor sleep!" said the boy.

"Yes, that's just it," whispered the girl. "That's just the way he was on the train--miles and miles it must have been--from the engine to the last car--all the time I mean--night and day--stalking up and down--up and down!"

"Little Stupid!" said her father.

"Who?--I?" gasped the girl. For a [10] second bewilderment she stared from the man's face to the boy's. "O--h!" she cried out in sudden enlightenment. "You _asked_ him to sit down, didn't you?" And fled from the room.

With a shiver of relief the boy turned squarely then to meet the man. The quizzically furrowed lines around the man's mouth still held their faint ironic humor but the boy's face in the full light showed strangely stark.

"Well--Lad," said the man very softly. "What have you got to tell me about it?"

"Why that's just it!" cried the boy. "What is there to tell except that I've been a thoughtless cad,--a----"

"How--thoughtless?" said the man.

"And that your daughter isn't one bit to blame!" persisted the boy. "Not one bit! And for the rest of it----" he cried out desperately. "What am I expected to say? What ought I to say? For God's sake what do you want me to say? Oh, of course, I've read yarns," he flushed. "French novels and all that sort of thing, but when it comes down to one's self and a--and a girl you know----Why--what's the matter with everybody?" [11] he demanded furiously. "A fellow isn't rotten just because he's a fellow! And it isn't even as though I had wanted to be rotten but wasn't! I never _thought_ of being rotten!" Hotter and hotter the red shame flared in his face. "It's a nasty, dirty, evil-minded world!" he stormed. "Why you'd think to hear Miss Merriwayne talk that----"

"Miss who?" said the older man.

"Miss Merriwayne," said the boy. "Claudia Merriwayne--the president of the college, you know."

"No, I didn't know," said the man.

"She's a fiend!" said the boy. "An utterly merciless----" In a hectic effort to regain his self-control he bit the sentence in two and began to repace the room. "There--there was a dance at the college that night," he resumed at last with reasonable calmness.

"I don't go in much for that sort of thing. I don't live in town, you see, but miles and miles outside. I'm just a 'farmer,' you know," he confided with his first faint ghost of a smile. "My brother and I have a bit of a ranch outside. We're trying very hard to be 'scientific farmers.' It's the deuce of a [12] job! And whenever there comes a night that I've got pep enough to stay awake I'd rather ride somehow than fuss around with people. Sometimes I ride all night! I've got a horse named Brainstorm! And he's some devil!" In the instant's transfiguring glow he was all young god again, superb, defiant. Then as though with a spasm of pain his young mouth tightened to a single determinate line. With the air of one suddenly very tired he stopped his restless pacing and backed into the supporting angle of the bookcase.

"But on this particular night--that I was telling you about," he resumed unhappily, "I had a sort of a feeling somehow that I'd like to go to the dance. It isn't always easy, you know," he confided with unexpected ingenuousness. "After the long day's work, I mean, with your back broken and your arms sprained, to come in and round up your own hot tub and your own shaving things and your own supper and the evening clothes you haven't even seen for six months. And I forgot the supper," he smiled faintly. "We haven't any woman at the house just now. But after you get to the dance you don't [13] mind!" he brightened transiently. "It's so bright and sweet-smelling! So many lights and colors! And so many funny dresses! And the music certainly is bully! And then all of a sudden at some silly hour like eleven o'clock everything shuts down and you have to go home! Why you'd only just come! Just got into your step, I mean! Just met the girls you wanted to meet! Just begun to laugh! Just begun to fool! That's the trouble with college parties," he frowned. "They're so darn institutional! No hanging round afterwards to forage in the kitchen and help put the house to bed, no nice jolly dawdling about on the front steps to look at the moon, no funny, bumpy walk home through a plowed field with a girl in high-heeled shoes and a lace tidy over her head! Just _zip!_ Like that! 'Eleven o'clock! Everybody _get out!_' All that fun and prettiness and everything snuffed out like a sour candle just because some old dame wants to go to bed! It's too--it's too abrupt!" said the boy.

"So you felt?" prodded the man.

_"Felt?"_ cried the boy. "Why at five [14] minutes of eleven I felt so _fit_ I could have run nine miles to help put out a fire. But at eleven I was so mad I'd have run twenty just to start one!"

"So what _did_ you do?" said the man.

"I swore I wouldn't go home," flushed the boy, "until at least I'd had something to eat! You know what college feeds are, a cent's worth of salad and the juice of one cracker? Your daughter laughed. She thought it was funny. 'Oh, what a pity,' she said, 'that you can't have the cold roast chicken that's up in my room!' 'Where is your room?' I asked. I was laughing too. 'Oh, just round the corner in the next building,' she said. 'Trot along over with me and if nobody's round I'll scoot upstairs and toss it down to you!' It was further than I thought," said the boy. "And very nice. Just a two-minute cut across the campus, but stars, you know, and a crunch of snow, and the funny fat shapes of the orchestra instruments running for their train. And Lord but I was hungry! But when we got to the dormitory there were too many people round, it seemed, too many lights, too much passing, [15] not a single shadow in the whole world apparently that was big enough to toss a roast chicken into--let alone hide my great hulking shape. 'I just darsn't!' said your daughter. 'Somebody surely would see me, a matron or a proctor or the night watchman or some body!' And all of a sudden," flushed the boy, "it seemed to me so absolutely idiotic that a girl who'd never done any harm in her life should be shut up in a place where she couldn't even proffer food to a starving friend or finish out a dance or do any other decent normal thing just because some cranky old dame had other ideas. 'Well, there's no old dame who owns me!' I said. So if you're afraid to go get the chicken I'll come and get it myself!' 'Yes--I can--see you!' laughed your daughter. She was standing on the step as she spoke and she had on something very red and sort of cunning with a hood all black fur around her face and as she tilted up her chin to the light it looked as though even her hair was laughing at you. 'Well, I'm coming!' I laughed back. '_You_ darsn't!' she said. In an hour I was there! Oh, of course, I know I oughtn't to have done [16] it!" conceded the boy. "But upon my soul I swear I didn't think anything about it except that it was putting something over on some of those old dames! All this fuss about it's being a girl's room never entered my head for a moment I tell you! I've always had such an awful lot of girl cousins tumbling around. And it was all so darned easy after the moon went down! Such a nifty fire-escape and the toughest sort of an old wisteria vine and----"

"Was--she expecting you?" asked the man.

"No,--that was the trouble," flushed the boy. "Maybe at first she had wondered a bit if I'd really have the nerve--I don't know. But by the time I'd got there she'd started for bed. Was in her wrapper, I mean, with her hair down. Bare feet, you know, and all that sort of thing. And when I opened the window and slipped in across the edge she started to scream. Knew who I was all at once and all that--but the scream got started first. And I knew, of course, that wouldn't do, so I jumped and caught her in my arms to try and smother it out. And the door opened--and in walked President Merriwayne [17] herself. I don't know what she was doing there in that dormitory at that time of night. It may have been just accident or somebody may have overheard us fooling out on the front steps the hour before--I don't know. It just happened--that's all," said the boy. "And there was an awful scene, of course. Things said, I mean, that I shouldn't have supposed a woman would say to a young girl. And two or three teachers or proctors came running in. And there was a faculty meeting later of course. And somebody blabbed to a chambermaid and the chambermaid blabbed to somebody else. And a reporter got hold of it and----"

"And a reporter got hold of it?" said the man.

"Yes," shivered the boy.

"Pictures?" asked the man.

"Yes," said the boy.

"Pretty horrid?" said the man.

"Very horrid," said the boy.

For an instant there seemed to be no sound at all in the room except the sound of flame sucking at the birch juices on the hearth. [18]

Then the man looked up sharply from the birch log to the boy's quivering face.

"Well--was the roast chicken good?" he asked.

"_S--ir_?" stammered the boy.

"And so----?" prompted the man.

From the boy's lips a long shuddering sigh escaped. "And so," said the boy, "I have ruined your daughter's life."

"And what do you propose to do about it?" asked the man.

With a quick squaring of his shoulders the boy drew his fine young body to its full height.

"I propose to do whatever you want me to do," he said.

"Such as what?" asked the man.

"Such as anything!" said the boy. Almost imperceptibly his breath quickened. "Why, when I came here just now," he cried, "I came, of course, expecting to be stormed at, to be cursed, to be insulted, to be told I was a liar, to have everything I said or did rammed down my throat again! But you?----All you've done is just to listen to me! And believe me! And laugh! It's as though I'd hurt you so much you were sorriest of all [19] for me--and were trying every darned way you knew to keep me from going mad! It's as though----" From the sudden slight sag of his shoulders he rallied again with a gesture of folded arms and finality. "I tell you I want to do whatever you want me to do," he repeated quite simply.

"Have you talked with anyone--about this?" asked the man.

"Just with my brother," said the boy.

"And what did he say?" asked the man.

"It's the brother who runs the farm with me," explained the boy. "He's a cripple and rather a bit nervous now and then, but he reads an awful lot of books. Not just farm books I mean--not just scientific books, but all sorts of----"

"By which you are intending to imply," interrupted the man, "that your brother's opinion, even though nervous, may be considered fairly sophisticated?"

"Oh, yes," said the boy. "And we went into it all very thoroughly. All the scandal and notoriety of the expulsion, I mean, and the fright and the mortification, and the silly sap-headed mothers who won't let their [20] daughters chum with your daughter any more, and the old cats who all their lives long will be pussy footing after her with whispers and insinuations. It's the bill, of course, that I can't ever pay. That's the beastliness of it! But what I've got, of course, I must give towards it! This isn't just my opinion, you understand?" he questioned a bit sharply. "But it's my brother's, too! And it isn't just my brother's either! It's _mine_!"

"And that opinion is----?" prompted the man.

"I should like to ask your daughter to marry me!" said the boy.

"I admit that that opinion is--classical," drawled the man. "Shall--shall we consult the lady?"

"Yes," said the boy.

"Suppose you go to the door and call her," suggested the father.

An instant later the boy was on the threshold. With the hesitation of perplexity only he peered first to the right and then to the left.

"Miss Bretton!" he called.

"Not even 'Daphne?'" interpolated the man. [21]

With a vague gesture of surprise the boy swung back into the room.

"Why--why I never even _saw_ your daughter," he said, "until the night of the dance!"

"_What_?" cried the man.

Before the interrogative exclamation could even be acknowledged Daphne herself appeared upon the scene.

"Yes,--Mr. Wiltoner?" she faltered.

"Mr. Wiltoner," said her father quite abruptly, "has just made you an offer of marriage."

"A--what?" gasped the girl.

"Mr. Wiltoner--I would say," drawled her father, "has--just done himself the honor of asking your hand in marriage."

"What?" repeated the girl, her voice like a smothered scream.

"And he's quite poor, I judge," said her father, "with all his own way to make in the world--and a crippled brother besides. And whoever marries him now will have the devil of a time pitching in neck and neck to help him run his farm. Have to carry wood, I mean, and water, and help plow and help [22] scrub and help kill pigs--and help wrangle with the crippled brother and----"

"_What_?" gasped the girl.

"Oh, of course, I admit it's very old-fashioned," murmured her father, "very quixotic--very absurd--and altogether what any decent lad would do under the circumstances. And you, of course, will refuse him to the full satisfaction of your own thoroughly modern sense of chivalry and self-respect Nevertheless----" From the half-mocking raillery of the older man's eyes a sudden glance wistful as a caress shot down across the boy's sensitive face and superb young figure. "Nevertheless," he readdressed his daughter almost harshly, "I would to God that _you_ were old-fashioned enough to faint on his neck and accept him!"

"Why--why Father!" stammered the girl. "I'm engaged to the--to the English professor at college!"

Above the faint flare of a fresh cigarette the man's ironic smile broke suddenly again through shrewdly narrowed eyes.

"'Are'? Or 'were'?" he asked. "'Yet', you mean? 'Still?'" [23]

"Oh, of course, I know I can't marry anyone now," quivered the girl. "Everything's over--everything's smashed. It's only that--that----"

With the hand that had just tossed away a half-burnt match her father reached out a bit abruptly to clasp the boy's fingers.

"You hear, Richard?" he asked. "Your offer, it seems, is rejected! So the incident is closed, my boy--with honor to all and 'malice towards none!' Completely closed!" he adjured with a certain finality. "And the little lady----" he bowed to his daughter, "suffers no more--fear--nor ever will, I trust, while her life remains in my keeping." From his pocket he snatched a card suddenly, scribbled a line on it, and handed it to the boy. "I'm going South to-morrow," he smiled. "Daphne and I. To be gone rather indefinitely I imagine. About January send me a line! About your own luck, you know, that farm of yours and everything! It's very interesting!" With faintly forked eyebrows he turned to watch the precipitated parting between the boy and girl--a slender, quivering hand stealing limply into a clasp that wrung [24] it like a torture, blue eyes still baffled with perplexity lifting heavily to black eyes as quick as a bared nerve. "Good-bye!" said the man quite trenchantly.

"Good-bye," choked the girl.

"Good-bye!" snapped the boy.

Then the man and his daughter stood alone again.

"There's a bath-room down the hall!" said the man. "And my own room is just beyond. Take a tub! Take a nap. Take--something! I've got a letter to write and don't want any one around!"

It was quite evident also that he didn't want any things around, either. The instant his daughter had left him he turned with a single impetuous gesture and swept all the books and papers from his desk. It might have been the tantrumous impulse of a child, or the unconscious urge of the spirit towards unhampered elbow room.

Certainly there was neither childishness nor spirituality in the plain businesslike paper and strong, blunt handwriting that went to the composition of the letter. An almost breathless immediacy seemed also a distinctly [25] actuating factor in the task. As fast ever as hand could reach pen and pen could reach ink and ink could reach paper again the writer drove to his mark.

To Miss Claudia Merriwayne,

President, -------- College (said the letter).

So it is you, dear Clytie Merriwayne, who have so peremptorily thus become the arbitrator of my family fame and fortunes?

God Almighty! How Time flies! You, old enough to have a college. And I, old enough to have a daughter expelled from the same! Why did you do it, Clytie? Not have a college, I mean, but expel my daughter? Truly she seems to me like rather a nice little kid. And now I suppose in the cackle and comment of all concerned she stands forth "ruined" before the world. Yet when all's said and done, Clytie Merriwayne, who did the "ruining?" Not the little girl certainly. Most emphatically not that splendid boy! Who else then except yourself? Personally it would seem to me somehow at the moment as though you had bungled your college just [26] about as badly as I have bungled my daughter. My only conceivable excuse is that I've been a damned Ignoramus! What's yours?

Here I had a fine, frank, clean, prankish little girl who didn't know a man from a woman, and you have changed her into a cowering, tortured, and altogether bewildered young recreant who never again, as long as time lasts, perhaps, will ever be able to tell a saint from a devil, or a lark from a lust, or a college president from any other traducer of youth and innocence. Yet you are considered to be something of a Specialist in girls, I should suppose. As well as once having been a girl yourself.

How ever did you happen to do it, I say? How ever in the world did you happen to do it?

"For discipline," of course you will most instantly affirm. "A necessary if drastic example to all the young lives in your charge. Youth being," as you will undoubtedly emphasize, "the formative period of character." It certainly is, Clytie! The simplest garden catalogue will tell you the same. Young things grow on the morning sun! That's the [27] phrase--everywhere. But don't ever forget, Clytie, that they blight just as easily on that selfsame sun! And if you have blighted my little girl instead of 'grown' her I shall not easily forgive you.

"What?" I can hear you demand in hectic righteousness. "Do I claim for one minute that my little daughter has committed a Propriety instead of an Impropriety?" (Oh, Clytie, haven't you learned even yet that Youth is almost never proper but, oh, so seldom vicious?) Admitting perfectly frankly to all the world that my daughter has committed a very grave Impropriety I must still contend that she has by no means committed a Viciousness! And even God Almighty, that shrewdest of Accountants, exacts such little toll for Improprieties. It's these sharkish overhead charges of middlemen like you that strain Youth's reputational resources so.

Far be it from me, alas, to deny that there undoubtedly _is_ a hideous amount of evil in the world. But more and more I stand astonished before the extraordinarily small amount of it that smoulders in young people's bodies compared with the undue proportion of it [28] that flames so frankly in older people's minds! In this case in point for instance, it's your whole moral premises that are wrong! It isn't just that the boy wouldn't have hurt her if he could. But that he couldn't have hurt her if he would! Both equally "pure in heart!" Both romping equally impishly through a moment's impulsive adventure! My God! I'd hate to be the first evil thought that had ever butted into a youngster's mind!

But enough! What you need in your college, perhaps, is a little less French and a little more Biology! Quite a bit more mercy certainly! This setting steel traps for Vice and catching Innocence instead is getting to be an altogether too common human experience. And some of us who have watched the writhings of an accidentally incarcerated household pet have decided long since that even a varmint doesn't quite deserve a steel trap!

But all this, Clytie, being neither here nor there, I come now to the real point of my letter which is to ask a favor.

My little daughter is pretty sick, Clytie--sick mentally, I mean--sex-scared, socially [29] and emotionally disorganized. On the particular trip I am planning for the winter into the more or less primitive and lawless wild-lands of the far South I am hoping that she will find plentiful opportunity to reconstruct her courage from the inherent principles alone of Right and Wrong. But failing this hope by the time the Northern summer is due----?

Have you no memories, Clytie, of another college room? And another indiscretion? Which beginning soberly with a most worthy desire to exchange Philosophy note books ended--if my memory serves right--with a certain amount of kissing. Yet will you contend for one single instant, Clytie, that your thoughts that night were one whit less clean than my daughter's? That there were four "improper" youngsters in that episode, instead of two as now, does not greatly in my mind refute the similarity. Nor the fortuitous chance by which one boy had just vanished over the window-sill and you into another room when _that_ blow fell! Do you remember the things that were said then, Clytie Merriwayne? To your room-mate, I mean? Poor [30] little frightened baby! Seventeen, wasn't she? And cut her throat at dawn rather than meet what had to be met? Pretty little white throat it was too as I remember it. With a rather specially tender and lilting little contralto voice that would have been singing lullabys in another four or five years. And the boy? The boy who was caught, I mean? Not a bad sort at all! Was rather intending to make something fairly decent of himself--up to then! But after the blood-red things the girl's father and mother said to him? He went a bit "batty" after that, some people said! A bit wild anyway! Eighteen or nineteen he must have been? Oh, ye gods, what a waste! Babies _all_! And to make them suffer so! Just by the thickness of a door you escaped it, Clytie! Just by the whish of a skirt! Except for that----?

Well this is the favor, Clytie. If by Summer my little girl is still staggering under the nervous and moral burden of feeling herself the only "improper" person in the world, I shall ask your permission to tell her the incident here noted, assuring you of course in all fairness and decency--if I am any judge [31] of young character--that she will never tell on you as you have told on her!

As for the rest if I have written over-garrulously I crave your pardon. This turning the hands of the clock backwards is slower work than turning them ahead.

For old time's sake believe me at least

_Sincerely_ yours,

JAFFREY BRETTON.

With a sigh of relief then he rose from his desk, lit another cigarette, and started down the hall, with Creep-Mouse, the blue hound, skulking close behind him.

As he crossed the threshold of his own room and glanced incidentally towards his bed a gasp of purely optical astonishment escaped him. All hunched up in a pale blue puffy-quilt his lovely little daughter lay ensconced among his snow-white pillows. Across her knees innumerable sheets of paper fluttered. Close at her elbow a discarded box of pencils lay tossed like a handful of jack-straws. And the great blue eyes that peered out at him from the cloud of bright gold hair were all brimmed up again with terror and tears. [32]

"I'm--I'm writing to John," she said.

"John?" queried her father.

"Why--yes,--the English professor--at college,--don't you remember?" faltered the girl. "Don't--don't you want to know about John?"

"No, I don't!" said the man. "There's nothing important about 'John' that 'John' won't have a chance to show for himself--in this immediate situation."

"Isn't it--isn't it--Hell?" quivered the girl.

"N--o--o," said her father. "I shouldn't consider it just Hell. But I admit it's something of a poser for a man in John's position. He's one of the faculty of course?"

"Yes," said the girl.

"And was at the faculty meeting--presumably when----"

"Yes," said the girl.

"Was your engagement--announced?" asked her father quite abruptly. "Generally known, I mean, among the girls?"

"No--not--exactly," said the girl.

"U--m--m," said her father. From his wordless stare at the wall he glanced down a [33] bit sharply at the wan little face before him. "Heard from him yet?" he demanded.

"No, not yet," said the girl. "Why he doesn't know where I am! Nobody knows where I am, I tell you! I just ran away, I tell you! I didn't even wait to pack! I--I----But, of course, I _will_ hear!" she asserted passionately. "I will! I _will_! It isn't that I expect to--to marry him now," she explained piteously. "Nobody of course--would want to marry me now. It's only that----"

Before the sudden rush of color to her face her father gave a little startled gasp.

"Hanged if you're not pretty!" he said. "Shockingly pretty!" With an almost amused interest his eyes swept down across the exquisite little face and figure all muffled up to the tips of its ears in the great blue puffy-quilt against the snow-white pillows. "Truly when I came in here just now," he laughed, "I thought a magazine-cover had come to life on my bed!" With the laughter still on his lips all the mischief went suddenly out of his eyes. "You heard what I said just now about going South to-morrow?" he asked a [34] bit trenchantly. "I'm sorry if it seems peremptory. But my plans have been made for some time. I had intended to take only--Creep-Mouse with me."

"Creep-Mouse?" questioned the girl.

"Oh, of course, there are a dozen other dogs up country that I could choose from," reflected her father with a somewhat frowning introspection. "But when it comes to traveling about and putting up with things, Creep-Mouse alone combines the essential characteristics of an undauntable disposition--with folding legs."

"Oh, of course, I can't speak too positively about my undauntable disposition," rallied the girl with the faintest possible smile, "but I certainly will try to take the hint about the folding legs----"

"Hint?" snapped her father. "Oh, it wasn't so much the adaptability business I was thinking about as it was about the dog!" With a gesture almost embarrassed he reached down suddenly and drew the hound's plushy ear through his fingers. "Oh, hang it all, Daphne!" he resumed quite abruptly, "you and I might easily not like the same opera [35] or the same hors-d'oeuvre--but I'd hate anyone round who didn't like the same dog."

"I--adore--Creep-Mouse!" said Daphne.

"Truly?" quizzed her father.

"Truly!" twinkled Daphne.

"Oh, all right then," said her father, "I guess we understand each other!"

"Perfectly," nodded Daphne.

"For all time," said her father.

"All time," acquiesced Daphne.

With his watch in his hand and his dark eyes narrowed to some unspoken thought he thrust out his last admonishment to her.

"Then take all the brace there is!" he said, "and hustle out and get some new clothes! It's quite lucky on the whole, I imagine, that you didn't have time to pack up any of your college things for you certainly won't need anything--academic in the place we're heading for! It's not any South that you've ever heard of that we're going to, you understand?" he explained with the faintest possible tint of edginess in his tone. "No Palm Beaches! No pink sash-ribbons! No tennis! No velvet golf courses! No airy--fairy--anythings! But a South below the South! A [36] South all heat and glare and sweat and jet-greens jungles! Tropics and slime! Rough! Tough! Pretty nasty some of the time. Violently beautiful--almost always! And we're going down to _hunt_!" he added with certain decisiveness. "And to _fish_! And to study citrus fruits when there's nothing else to do! And you might just as well know it now as later," he resumed with all his old insouciance. "I--am--also going to find me a wife if such a thing is humanly possible."

"A--wife?" gasped the girl. "Oh, this--this eternal marrying business!" she shivered. "If it's all so dreadful, about men, I mean, why do women keep marrying? What's the righteousness of it? What's the decency? What's it all about?"

"Don't forget that I'm one of these 'dreadful men,'" smiled her father.

"Yes--I--know," quivered the girl.

"But----" Like a butterfly slipping out of its cocoon one shoulder slipped lacy-white from the blue puffy-quilt. "What about my own mother?" she demanded.

"Your mother has been dead for fifteen years," said the man. [37]

"Yes--but Father," persisted the girl.

With folded arms the man stood watching her bright young color wax--and wane again.

"If there's anything you want to ask," he suggested, "maybe you'd better ask it now--and get it over with."

"Oh, I didn't want to be inquisitive," stammered the girl. "It's only that--that servants and relatives talk so--and I know so little. You--you and mother didn't live together, did you?" she questioned quite abruptly.

"No," said the man.

"You--you mean there was trouble?" flushed the girl.

"There was--some trouble," said the man.

"You mean that you--didn't like her?" probed the merciless little voice.

"No--I--didn't--like her," said the man without a flicker of expression.

Clutching the blue quilt about her the girl jumped to the floor and ran swiftly to him.

"Oh, Father!" she cried. "Whatever in the world will I do if you don't like _me_?"

"But I do like you!" smiled her father. Shy as a boy he reached out and touched her sunny hair. "Only one condition!" he rallied [38] with sudden and unaffected sternness. "When you broke into my study just now you called me 'Old-Dad'! Up to that moment I had considered myself--some--young--buck. Never again--as long as you live--I warn you--ever call me anything _except_ Old-Dad! Darned if it isn't sobering!" [39]

II

THE scene that Daphne had left behind her two thousand miles or more, though more academic of course, was none the less poignant to the one most concerned.

Deflected by a more or less erudite lecture-obligation to a town at least gossip-distance away, no faintest rumor of any college chaos whatsoever had reached John Burnarde's ears till the evening after the dance, when just recrossing the well-worn threshold of his beautiful, austere study, the shrill harsh clang of his telephone bell rang down the curtain on what had been the most exquisitely perfect episode of even his fastidious life.

Yet even then no whisper prepared him for what the alarm was all about. Poor John Burnarde!

Whatever else an academic training may teach an undergraduate it has certainly never taught a member of the faculty what to do when summoned post-haste to the President's [40] office to consult with various other members of the faculty on what has been pronounced "a most flagrant breach of moral as well as of academic standards" he finds the case to be the exceedingly delicate one of a girl-student caught entertaining a man in her room late at night,--and the girl herself--his fiancee!

That the betrothal at that moment was known only to himself and the girl gave John Burnarde the last long breath, he felt, that he should ever draw again.

Still a bit flushed, a bit breezy, with his brisk sprint across the chill November campus, he was just slipping out of his overcoat in the doorway of the President's office when the name "Daphne Bretton" first struck across his startled senses. Half hampered by a balky overshoe, half pinioned by a ripped sleeve-lining he thrust his head alone into the conference.

"What?" he demanded.

"This will hit Burnarde rather roughly, I'm afraid," whispered the History Man to the Biology Woman. "She's quite his star English pupil, I imagine. Has done one [41] little bit of lyric verse already, they say, that is really rather remarkable. Very young of course, very ingenuous, but quite remarkably knowing."

"Maybe now we can guess where she gets her 'knowingness,'" murmured the new Bible Instructor behind her pure white ringers.

"_What_?" demanded John Burnarde all over again. The winter wind seemed to have faded oddly from one cheek but was still spotting hecticly in the other. "_What_?" he persisted bewilderedly, still struggling with his overshoes.

"Why it's the Bretton girl!" prompted a sharp voice from some dark seat in the corner.

"That pretty little Bretton girl," regretted a gentler tone.

"Yes--I--I--know who you mean," stammered Burnarde. "But--but----"

"Always made me think of apple-blossoms--somehow," confided the old Mathematics professor a bit surreptitiously.

"Apple-blossoms?" mumbled poor Burnarde.

"So sort of pink and white and fresh and--and [42] fragrant. 'Pon my soul when she comes into my class and takes a front seat it makes me feel a little queer. It's like being a boy again! Young grass, May morning, and a wind through the apple orchard! Fragrancy? Yes, that's it!"

"Yes, it's just exactly the flagrancy of it that makes the scandal so complete!" interposed the President's keenly incisive feminine voice.

Instantly every eye except Burnarde's reverted to the unquestionable dominance of the President's ash-blond personality.

Burnarde alone, looming lean, keen, tense, on the edge of the group, with five generations of poise and reticence masking the precipitant horror in his mind, stood staring blankly from one face to another of his cruder-birthed associates.

"I--protest!" he said.

"Protest?" questioned the President's coolly inflected voice. "Protest what?" With a graceful if somewhat studied gesture of patience Miss Claudia Merriwayne laid down her jotting pencil and narrowed her cold gray eyes to the eyes of her youngest [43] professor. "You were a little late getting here I think, Mr. Burnarde," she admonished him perfectly courteously, "but the general circumstances of the case you have gleaned quite sufficiently, I think, even in this last brief moment or so? Surely in a case so--so distressing," she flushed, "it will not be necessary for us to--to revive the details in all their entirety? In the half hour that we have been discussing the matter. It _is_ a half hour, isn't it?" she turned sharply and asked of her nearest neighbor.

"Fully a half hour!" gloated the nearest neighbor.

"Miss Bretton, of course, will have to leave college," resumed the President succinctly. "Definitely--positive expulsion is, of course, the only path open to us!"

"I protest!" said John Burnarde.

From some half-shadowed corner directly in front of him a distinctly Continental smile flared up on a French instructor's face. Close at his elbow the phrase "little sly, pink-faced minx" hissed plainly from one gossip to another. The blood was surging in his ears! His heart was pounding like an [44] engine! Shock, bewilderment, nausea itself, racked chaotically through all his senses! Yet neither love nor loyalty, a girl's honor or a man's dignity, seemed to him at that moment to be essentially served by capping sensationalism with sensationalism. Sophisticated as he was in all the finer knowledges that book or life could offer, afraid of nothing on earth except the vulgarity of publicity, shy of nothing on earth except his great, grown-man desire for this little, young, exquisite girl, no power in the world could have forced him then and there to take the sweetest news he had ever known, or ever was to know, it would seem, and slop it down like so much kerosene to feed a flame already quite noxious enough. Still fighting desperately for time, still parrying for enlightenment, he kept his mask-like face turned blankly towards his companions.

"I protest!" he repeated tenaciously. "There is some mistake--some misunderstanding! Even in the two short months Miss Bretton has been with us she has certainly--Certainly----" In a voice as low as a nun's but particularly and peculiarly enunciative [45] he focused suddenly on the President. "The charge is absurd," he said. "It's outrageous! Someone has lied of course! And lied very badly."

With an ill-concealed gesture of exasperation the President straightened up in her chair and glared at her youngest professor.

"I--am the only person--who could have 'lied,'" she affirmed with some hauteur. Slowly into her cold strong-featured face a hot flush ebbed and waned again through lips that crisped a bit round the edges of her words. "If you _insist_ on knowing every detail, Mr. Burnarde," she said, "it was I myself who discovered Miss Bretton! And she was barefooted at the time--and in her nightdress--and clasped most emphatically in the young man's arms."

"What?" cried Burnarde. His very heart seemed to wrench itself loose at the word, but his tight lips bit back the agony into a mere raspishness of astonishment. "What?" Then quite as unexpectedly to himself as to any of the others an amazing little laugh slipped through where even agony could not pass. Oh ye god of Rhetoric! Ye subtlety [46] of Satire! Ye psychology of Climax! Was this the moment when a Master of Arts should fling his tenderest morsel to the dogs? "Betrothal?" Red as blood, white as a lily, the word flashed through his stricken senses! "Betrothal?" Oh ye gods of everything! A betrothal so new, so shy, so sacred, so reverential, that he had not yet even so much as affrighted the cool, unawakened, little-girl finger tips with the thrill of his grown-man lips! A betrothal so new, so shy, so precious, he had not yet even so much as shared the secret with his adorable, patrician mother! Announce it now? Proclaim it now? Merciful God! Was there anything left to proclaim? Yes, that was just exactly the question! _Was_ there anything left to proclaim? Even for loyalty, even in defense of the Beloved who had chosen so garishly--elsewhere, would it greatly enhance a substance as tender as a young girl's honor to scream out now? "_I also claimed her_--_once_?" Starkly his fine, clear-cut lips opened and shut again. "I--I protest!" he mumbled. Vaguely in a chaotic blur he sensed a restless exchange of glances, the soft, clothy shifting [47] and stir of busy people impatient to be off. Cleanly and concisely through the blur cut the President's persistent purpose.

"Expulsion, of course," said the President, "must always seem a drastic measure. But in the safety and protection of the greater number rests now as always the greater mercy. This Bretton girl, I understand, has grown up with practically no home surroundings, being shifted about from one boarding school to another ever since her earliest childhood, and knowing apparently very little more about her people than even I have been able to glean. The circumstances are very sad, of course, very unfortunate, but our duty at the moment, of course, concerns itself with results, not causes. Looking back now to her first appearance among us two months ago I realize that there has always been something about her that was vaguely disquieting, vaguely suggestive of lawlessness. Her eyes, perhaps, her hair, some odd little trick of manner. Certainly," quickened the President, "I would not be doing my duty by the hundreds of innocent young girls committed to my care if----" [48]

As though all life reverted then to the mere pursuit of hats and coats and rubbers, the Faculty Meeting dissolved into individual interests again and dispersed as such along the gloomy corridor and down the creaking stairs.

It was winter-cold on the stairs.

Shuffling a little in his overshoes, jerking his coat-collar just a bit tighter around his throat, John Burnarde felt suddenly very old. "Old? Merciful Heavens!" he winced. He was only thirty-five! Did Age come like that to a man in just the time it took him to go up and down the same gray, creaky, familiar stairs? "Apple Blossoms was it that the old Mathematics Professor had said she looked like? But God knew it wasn't just her little face that was Apple Blossomy, but her little mind also, and the little glad gay heart of her! So fresh, so new, so virgin-sweet! By what foul chance, by what incalculable circumstance, had she blundered into _this_?"

Stripped of passion, stripped even of protest, stripped indeed of every human emotion except his dignity and his pain he pushed his [49] way blindly out through interminable heavy doors and breasted the winter night.

Then quite suddenly, stripped of every emotion _except_ pain, he swung around in his tracks, remounted the stairs, re-entered the President's office, and slamming the door be hind him, flung down even his dignity on the altar of his love.

"Miss Merriwayne!" he said. "This thing that you propose doing--cannot be done! I am engaged to Miss Bretton!"

For a single instant only, every knowledge, manner, poise, that John Burnarde had been born with, defied every knowledge, manner, poise, that Claudia Merriwayne had worked forty years to acquire.

Then reverting suddenly to the identical accent with which Claudia Merriwayne's mother was still lashing Claudia Merriwayne's father, doubtless, in the little far away North Kansas home, the College President opened her thin lips to speak.

"The thing--is already done,--Mr. Burnarde," she said. "Miss Bretton left town an hour ago--and with her paramour, I am told!" [50]

"With her--what?" cried John Burnarde.

"With her 'paramour,'" repeated the President coolly.

"The word is unfortunate," frowned Burnarde.

"So--is the episode," said the President.

With a little sharp catch of his breath John Burnarde stepped forward to the edge of the desk.

"You understand that I am going to marry Miss Bretton?" he affirmed with some incisiveness.

"Not in my college!" said the President. "Nor in any other college if I even so much as remotely gauge either the professional or the social exigencies of the situation." Emphatically, but by no means extravagantly, she drove her meaning home. "Do you dream for one single moment, Mr. Burnarde," she quizzed, "that any reputable college in the land would accept, or maintain on its faculty," she added significantly, "a man whose wife for reasons of moral obliquity had not been considered a safe associate for----"

"You mean----" interrupted John Burnarde. [51]

"Everything that I say," acquiesced the President, "and everything that I imply."

"That is your ultimatum?" questioned John Burnarde.

"That is my ultimatum!" said the President.

With the slightest perceptible tightening of his lips John Burnarde began to put on his gloves.

"Very fortunately," he said, "there are other professions in the world besides the teaching of English."

"Very fortunately," conceded the President. One side of her mouth lifted very faintly with the concession. "Yet somehow, Mr. Burnarde," she added hastily, "I do not seem to picture you as a--as an automobile salesman, for instance. Nor yet visualize that frail, lovely mother of yours relinquishing very easily her life-long ambitions for your deanship--which up to now, of course, has by no means seemed the improbable fruition of your distinguished services with us. Your mother," mused the President, "has doubtless made some sacrifices for you--in her time?" [52]

"Most mothers have!" snapped John Burnarde.

Roused snap for snap to his tone the President leaned forward suddenly.

"You're not the only man," she cried, "who has been both flouted and betrayed by Frivolity! Next time you choose----" Her cheeks flushed scarlet. "Next time you choose, perhaps you will choose more wisely, more consistently with your age and attainments! This mad infatuation is surely but the mood of a moment, the----" Recovering her self-control as quickly almost as she had lost it she sank back with typical statuesqueness into her throne-like Jacobean chair. "Surely, Mr. Burnarde," she asked in all sincerity, "you must admit that the--that the warning I have given you is at least--reasonable?"

"Absolutely reasonable!" said John Burnarde. "And absolutely damnable!" And turning on his heel he stalked from the room.

But even the winter night could not cool his cheeks now, nor the great pile of unread themes and forensics that he found awaiting him in his room, divert his tortured mind for one single second from the problems of a [53] lover to the problems of a professor. Somewhere indeed, he reasoned, among that white flare of papers a fresh stab of pain undoubtedly awaited him, a familiar handwriting strangely poignant, some little brand new bud of an idea forging valiantly upward through the clotted sod of academic tradition into the sunshine of acknowledged success, a purely prosy rhetorical question, perhaps, thrilled to its very interrogation mark by the sweet new secret hidden behind its formality!

With an irresistible impulse he began suddenly to rummage through the themes. Yes, here was _the_ handwriting! With fingers that trembled he unfolded the page. Dated the very night before this dreadful thing had happened, surely somehow--somewhere on this very page the dreadful thing must be disproved!

"Dear Mr. Burnarde," ran the little note pinned to the page. "Dear Mr. Burnarde" (Oh, the delicious camouflage of the formality). Please, I beg of you do not be angry with me because I am submitting no prose theme this week! I just can't, somehow! I'm all verse these days! What do you think [54] about this one? There are oodles and oodles more lines to it of course, but this is to be the recurrent refrain:

He who made Hunger, Love, and the Sea, Made three tides which have got to be!

"Oh, of course, I know you'll say that the word 'got' isn't particularly poetical and all that. But it's simply got to be 'got,' don't you see? Why----"

Right in the middle of the unfinished sentence he crumpled the page in his hand. Merciful Heavens, if she was innocent why hadn't she written him? Or even if she were sorry--only? Or even if----If people had any explanations to give they usually gave them to you, didn't they? "Gave" them to you? _Forced_ them on you, rather, didn't they? Fairly _hurled_ them at you? This staking all for love? Yes, surely! Social position! Professional reputation! Even his mother's heart! _For love_? Yes, that was it! But suppose--the object of such love--fairly flaunted herself as being neither loving--nor lovable? Maddened anew by the futility of it all he plunged down at his desk and [55] began to write a letter--and tore that letter up! And began another and tore that up! And began another! Merciful Heavens! he suffered. Was his hand palsied? His brain blighted? Were there no live words left in all the world--except just those which crowded every other sane thought out of his mind?

"He who made hunger, love, and the sea, Made three tides which have got to be!" [56]

III

TAKEN all in all, _mileage_ undoubtedly is just about the paltriest form of separation that can occur between two people. If only Fate would break its impish habit of always and forever introducing such perfectly unexpected things into mileage! Even Fate though at just this time hadn't quite made up its mind perhaps just what it intended to do with little Daphne Bretton!

Given good food, a brave heart, and any reasonable amount of diversion, most young people outgrow their sins and even their mistakes almost as soon as they outgrow their clothes. But to outgrow a punishment is quite a different matter! People who deal out punishments ought to think about that!

Daphne Bretton and her father had to think a good deal about it. Daphne especially! Totally uninjured by her mistake but pretty badly crippled by her punishment the world looked very dark to Daphne. [57]

Being only eighteen and having thus far evolved no special philosophy of her own concerning the best way to meet Life's inevitable disasters it was rather fortunate perhaps in the present emergency that she had at least her father's philosophy to fall back upon. Her father's philosophy was so amazingly simple.

"No matter what happens," said her father, "never wear a worried looking hat!"

"Which being interpreted," puzzled Daphne, "means----"

Like a Fancier perfectly willing to share the cut-flowers of his mind but quite distinctly opposed to parting with the roots of any of his ideas her father parried the question.

"Which being interpreted," he repeated a bit stiffly, "means '_Never wear a worried looking hat_!'"

Certainly there developed nothing worried looking about Daphne Bretton's Florida-going hat! Nor about her suit, either! Nor her shoes! Nor her silken stockings! Her hat was crisp, with a flare of pink in it, her suit was blue, her shoes and silkies distinctly [58] trim. From top to toe, bright hair, bright cheeks, lithe little body and all, there was nothing worried looking about Daphne Bretton except her eyes. Sweet eyes they were too, wide set, wistful, and inherently frank, though vaguely furtive now with the tragic, incongruous furtiveness of youth that having once perhaps feared overmuch that it would not be noticed is panic-stricken now lest it may be. Little girl eyes distinctly, and the eyes of a very worried little girl at that!

In the joggling crowd at the railroad station two women noticed her only too quickly. The little blue hound himself sniffing close at her heels quickened to the trail no more avidly than they.

"Bet you a dollar," gasped the first, "that that's the Bretton girl!"

"Bretton girl?" gloated the other in an only too audible whisper.

"Why, yes, of course, you know," nudged the first "That one, you know, that was expelled from college for having a boy in her room at night! Oh, an awful scandal it was! Why the Sunday papers were full of it last week!" [59]

"Oh, yes, of course, I saw it," confided the second. "A whole page of pictures, wasn't it? Perfectly disgusting, I call it! So bold--so----"

"Pretty, though, isn't she?" deprecated the first.

"If you like that fast type," sneered the second.

"Oh, and look at her now!" snickered the first. "Got an older man in tow this time! And, oh goodness, but isn't he a stunner with all that white hair and elegant figure and swell traveling bags! If there's one thing I think refined it's swell traveling bags! But, oh, isn't it awful the way rich people cut up? Wouldn't you think her folks would stop her? Wouldn't you?"

From under the sheltering, shadowy brim of her hat Daphne shot an agonized glance at her father's half-averted face. But to her infinite astonishment her father's deep-set eyes were utterly serene, and even his shrewd mouth was relaxed at the moment into the faint ghost of a perfectly amiable smile.

"Old-Dad--are you deaf?" she gasped with a little quick clutch at his arm. [60]

"When geese are cackling," said her father.

"And blind?" flared Daphne.

"When the view is offensive," admitted her father. With unwavering nonchalance he swung around suddenly to the nearest news stand and began then and there to pile Daphne's blue broadcloth arms with every funny paper in sight.

From lips quivering so that they could barely function their speech Daphne protested the action. "Why--why, Old-Dad," she pleaded. "Do you think for one single moment that I shall ever smile again? Or--or ever--even want to smile again?" In a fresh shiver of tears and shame the hot tears started to her eyes. "Why I'm nothing but--but just an outlaw!" she gasped. "A--a-- sort of a----"

"Personally," conceded her father, "I'd infinitely rather travel with an outlaw than an inlaw! They're so inherently more considerate--somehow, so----" Quite imperturbably as he spoke he kept right on piling up the magazines in Daphne's protesting arms. "Steady there, Kiddie!" he admonished her smilingly. "Steady! Steady! Never let any [61] sorrow you'll ever meet leak into your chance to laugh! Water-tight your compartments--that's the idea! Love, Hope, Fear, Pride, Ambition--everything walled off and separate from another! And then if you run into a bit of bad weather now and then, Little Girl, you won't--" Aghast at the increasing tremor of the little figure he broke off abruptly in the midst of his message. "Why the only trouble with you, Daphne," he laughed, "is that you are so pretty! It's an awful responsibility I tell you to travel with a daughter who's so extravagantly pretty. So many complicating things are bound to happen all the time. Beaux, for instance, and----"

"Beaux?" winced Daphne.

"Such as the incipient one yonder," nodded her father.

Following the general direction of the nod the girl's eyes raked somewhat covertly but none the less thoroughly the shadow just back of the flower booth.

"O--h," she shivered. "_That_?" Back of her lovely blondeness, her youth, her vitality, the delicate fine-boned structure of her face [62] loomed suddenly into the faint, poignant outline of the ultimate skull. "Do--do you think he's a reporter?" she stammered.

"Reporter _nothing_!" snapped her father. Snatching up the traveling bags he headed quite precipitously for the train. White as a little ghost Daphne pattered after him. Close at her heels followed the blue hound.

"What a stunning looking man!" said someone. "And what an awfully pretty girl!" murmured another. "And what a funny looking dog!" agreed everybody.

"For goodness sake, don't you know who it is?" called the girl at the flower booth to the girl at the news-stand.

"Naw," admitted the girl at the news-stand.

"Oh, pshaw," preened the girl at the flower booth. "Don't you know anything? Why it's Jaffrey Bretton the--the--well, I don't know what he is except that he's richer than--oh, richer than Croesus! And wild? Oh, Gee! Why I knew a chauffeur once that knew a cook that said----"

So Jaffrey Bretton and Daphne and the little blue hound passed from the rabble of the station to the rumble of the train. [63]

The rumble of the train is at least a pleasant sound. And when one's nerves are just a bit over-frazzled with the cantankerous parlance of men it is not a half bad idea for the price of a railroad ticket to yield one's ears for such time as one may to the simpler things that Steel, Wood, and Plush have to say to each other. "Strength!" pulses Steel. "Form!" urges Wood. "Rest!" purrs Plush. "Strength--Form--Rest! Strength--Form--Rest!" On and on and on, just like that, day and night, mile and mile, swirl and sway, with no more effort to one's brittle-nerved, ice-chilled body than lolling in a bath-tub would be, while the great Sunny South like so much hot water comes pouring in, a little deeper, a little hotter, every minute, to lave and soothe Past, Present, and Future alike. God bless Railroad Journeys!

Surely it was at least twenty-four restful hours before the "parlance of men" caught up with Daphne and her father again. This catching up, however, proved itself quite sufficiently unpleasant.

It had been rather an eerie day, an eerie twilight anyway, as railroad twilights are apt [64] to be with a great, smooth-running, brilliantly lighted, ultra-perfected train of ultra-perfected cars slipping deeper and deeper and deeper into the black morass of a wild, swampy, tropical night.

Eerieness for eerieness Daphne Bretton's eyes matched the night. Sparkle for sparkle Jaffrey Bretton's eyes matched the train. To escape the sparkle Daphne pleaded a desire to dally alone in her quiet dark drawing-room. To escape the eerieness Jaffrey Bretton vaunted the intention of finding some stray man who could smoke more cigars than he. With an unwonted touch of formality, a sudden strange shyness of scene and sentiment they bowed their good-nights to each other.

"See you in the morning!" nodded her father.

"In the morning," acquiesced Daphne.

Nothing on earth could have brightened her eyes at the moment. Nothing on earth could have dulled her father's. Yet within an hour when they met again it was Daphne's face that was fairly blazing with excitement and her father's that was stricken with brooding. [65]

Maybe too much "looking back" even from the last car of a train isn't specially good for any man. Certainly just sitting up till nine o'clock never made any man look so tired.

Joggling back to his warm, plushy Pullman car from the cindery murk and chill of the observation platform it was then that Jaffrey Bretton sensed through the tail of his eye, as it were, the kaleidoscopic blur of a scuffle in the smoking-room. Tweed-brown, newspaper-white, broadcloth-blue, the fleeting impress struck across his jaded optic nerve, till roused by a sudden lurch of his heart to the familiar blueness of that blue he whirled around in the narrow aisle and yanked aside the curtain just in time to behold a perfectly strange young man forcing a kiss on Daphne's infuriated lips.

"But I _am_ Daphne Bretton! I _am_! I _am_!" fought the girl.

"Why, of course, you're 'Daphne Bretton!'" kissed the man. "So why be so particular?"

"And I--happen to be Daphne Bretton's--father!" hailed Jaffrey Bretton quite incisively from the doorway. [66]

"Eh? _What_?" jumped the Kissing Man.

"Oh--O--h!" gasped Daphne.

With a somewhat hectic attempt at nonchalance the Kissing Man stooped down and picked up the crumpled newspaper at his feet.

"Well, it's my newspaper, anyway!" he grinned.

"It's mine if I want it!" began Daphne all over again.

With a quick jerk of his wrist the stranger twisted the newspaper from the girl's snatching fingers and began rather awkwardly to smooth out the crumple and piece together the fragments. It was the pictorial supplement of a week-old Sunday paper and from its front page loomed an almost life-sized portrait of Daphne extravagantly bordered and garnished with what some cheap cartoonist considered a facetious portrayal of Daphne's recent tragedy.

"Do--you want your head--kicked off?" asked Jaffrey Bretton.

"No, I don't," admitted the stranger. "But even if I did," he confided with undismayed diablerie, "how ever in the world should we locate it? I seem to have lost it so badly!" [67] By no means unattractive even in his impudence he turned his flushed, indecorous face to Daphne and in the sudden tilt of his deeply-cleft chin the electric light struck down rather mercilessly across a faint white scar that slashed zig-zag from his turbid, reckless eyes to a most ingenuous dimple in his left cheek.

"You are--drunk!" said Jaffrey Bretton quite frankly.

"Yes, a little," admitted the stranger. "But even so," he persisted with an elaborate bow. "But even so, the young lady here will hardly contend, I think, that I acted entirely without provocation!"

"Provocation?" questioned Jaffrey Bretton. With the faintest perceptible frown blackening between his brows he turned to his daughter. "Daphne," he said, "don't you know that you haven't any business to enter a man's smoking-room?"

"But he wasn't smoking!" flared Daphne. "He was sleeping!"

"Well--a man's sleeping-room, then?" conceded her father.

"But I simply _had_ to have that newspaper!" [68] insisted Daphne. "I tell you I won't have it flaunted all over the train! Brought into the dining-car every meal! Flapped and rustled in my face--everywhere I look! Oh, you think you're _funny_, do you?" she cried out furiously as with one swift dart she snatched the offending page from the stranger's unguarded grasp and tore it into shreds before his eyes. "Oh, you think you're fu--fu--funny, do you?" she began to babble hysterically.

"Yes--but Daphne," said her father with scarcely a lift to his voice, "surely you don't imagine for a moment that you're destroying the whole edition? It can't be done, you know. No one yet has ever found a way to do it. Ten years hence from a wayside hovel some well-meaning crone will hand you the page to wrap your muddy rubbers in! Five thousand miles from here, on the other side of the world, you'll open your top bureau drawer to find it lined with your own immortal features! You just simply have to get used to it, that's all. Laugh at it! Keep a laugh always handy for just that thing!"

"_Laugh_?", flared Daphne. With a fresh [69] burst of fury she tore the tattered page through and through again. "Well, I've destroyed _this_ copy!" she triumphed. "No darkey porters or smirking tourists will ever see _this_ copy! And maybe when I get to Florida," she cried, "snakes will bite me! Or typhoons shipwreck me! Or--or something happen so that I won't have to come home again! But you, Old-Dad----" Tottering ever so slightly where she stood all the hot anger in her eyes faded suddenly into the vague, sinister bewilderment of a young mind crowded dangerously near to the edge of its endurance. "You--you see nobody knew I was bad until the College President said so," she explained painstakingly to no one in particular. "I didn't even know it myself, I mean. _But my father_----" she rekindled instantly. Like the rippling start of a young tiger just getting ready to spring she swung around sharply on the stranger again. "Surely you didn't think for a moment that it was just myself I was thinking about in that wicked old paper?" she demanded furiously of him. "For Heaven's sake, what earthly difference do you think any such thing [70] can make to _me_ now? My life's over and done with! But my father? The dreadful--malicious--flippant things they said about my father!"

"O--h! So it was my honor, was it, that you were defending?" asked her father a bit dryly.

As though she had not even heard the question, Daphne lifted her flaming, defiant little face to the stranger's. "Why, my Father's an _angel_!" she attested. "And he always was an _angel_! And he always will be an _angel_!"

"In which case," interposed her father quite abruptly, "we had better leave I think while the angeling is still good!" With a touch that looked like the graze of a butterfly's wing and felt like a lash of steel wires he curved his arm across her shoulder and swept her from the smoking-room. Once outside the curtain his directions were equally concise. "Trot along to your drawing-room, Kiddie!" he ordered. "I'll join you presently."

As he swung back into the smoking-room he almost tripped across the stranger's sprawling feet. Huddled in the corner with his [71] face buried in his hands the stranger sat sobbing like a woman.

"You are drunker than I thought!" said Jaffrey Bretton.

"I am fully--that," admitted the stranger.

"And a rotter!" said Jaffrey Bretton.

"Oh, no end of a rotter!" conceded the stranger.

"And if I am not very much mistaken," mused Jaffrey Bretton, "you are also the same man whom I noted--yesterday afternoon at the flower booth in the railroad station--staring so unconscionably--not to say offensively hard at my daughter?"

"I deny nothing!" hiccoughed the stranger. With an emotion that would have done credit to a sober sorrow he lifted his stricken face to his accuser. "And I don't mind at all that I'm drunk," he confided. "Nor--nor yet being the man who stared so--so hard at your daughter. But--but _why_ am I such a rotter? Frankly now as man to man how could I be such a rotter? That nice--nice little girl! That----" With uncontrollable remorse he buried his face in his hands again. [72]

"There are never but two reasons why a man pursues a woman," observed Bretton, "One because he respects her, and the other because he doesn't. My daughter has, of course, been a little unfortunate lately in achieving a certain amount of cheap newspaper notoriety." In a perfectly even line of interrogation his fine eyebrows lifted ever so slightly. "There was a woman back there at the railroad station," he confided, as though in sheer impulsiveness, "who rated my daughter indeed as being 'fast looking'. Now just about how 'fast looking' would you consider her?"

From behind the cage of his fingers the young man's lips emitted a most unhappy little groan.

"Why--why I should consider her," he mumbled, "just--just about as 'fast looking' as a new-born babe!" But his rowdy eyes, raking the older man's face, gathered no answering smile to their humor. "N--n--o?" he rallied desperately. "N--o? On--on further consideration I should say that that she wasn't _half_ as fast looking as a newborn babe! What? _Eh_?" he questioned [73] worriedly. "Well not a hundredth part, then? Not a thousandth? Not a--not a billionth? Oh, upon my soul," he sweated, "I can't think what comes higher than billions!

"A 'billion' is plenty high enough," said Jaffrey Bretton. "But such being the case--_why did you do it_?"

"Why did I do it?" mumbled the stranger.

"Why? Why----" Once again the rakish, confused young face lifted, but this time at least a single illuminating conviction transfigured its confusion. "Why--because she was so pretty!"

With a cigarette at his lips, a match poised halfway in mid-air, Jaffrey Bretton's heels clicked together. Sharp as the crackle of a trainer's whip his smile snapped into the situation.

"So you admit that she is pretty?" he asked quite tersely.

As though the question were a hook that fairly yanked him to his feet the stranger struggled upward and crossed his limp arms on his breast.

"She is--adorable!" he testified.

"And young?" urged Jaffrey Bretton. [74]

"Very young," acknowledged the stranger.

"And--spirited?" prodded Jaffrey Bretton. "Even tom-boyish perhaps? And distinctly innocent?"

"Oh, perfectly spirited!" grinned the stranger a bit wanly. "Ditto tom-boyish! And most essentially innocent!"

"So innocent," persisted Jaffrey Bretton. "So tom-boyish--so spirited--so young--so pretty--that taken all in all the only wonder is that--she wasn't expelled from college before."

"It is an absolute miracle!" brightened the stranger quite precipitously.

With a shrug of his shoulders Jaffrey Bretton resumed the lighting of his cigarette.

"The days--of miracles--are reputedly over," he confided very casually between puffs. "But the natural phenomenon of a formal apology is still occasionally observed, I believe, in the case where either a very crude or a very cruel injustice has been done."

With a click of his own heels the stranger added at least an inch to his otherwise slouching height. [75]

"I apologize in all languages!" he hastened to affirm.

"'Jeg beklager at jeg har vaeret uhoflig.' That's it in Norwegian, I believe! Now in Spanish----"

"What is just 'Plain Sorry?'" interrupted Jaffrey Bretton.

"_I am_!" cried the stranger. Like a sign post pointing "This way to the Smile!" the faint white scar that slashed across his face seemed to twitch suddenly towards the astonishing dimple in his left cheek. Robbed for that single instant of its frowning, furtive-eyed emphasis, his whole haggard young face assumed an expression of extraordinary ingenuousness. "Certainly, you've been awfully decent to me!" he smiled. "Thank you for being so--so decent! But--but--whatever in the world _made_ you so decent?" he began to waver ever so slightly. "Most fa--fathers you know, would have knocked me down!"

"I--don't--knock--sick men down," said Jaffrey Bretton quite simply.

"_Sick men_?" flared the stranger, all eyes again.

"But--some fathers--haven't such scruples," [76] confided Jaffrey Bretton. With absolutely merciless scrutiny his eyes swept over the swaying young figure before him--hollow temples, narrow chest, twittering wrists, and all. "And if--I hadn't any longer to live--than you evidently have," he added, without a flex of accent, "I don't think I would squander any very large amount of it in forcing tipsy kisses on young girls."

"_What would you do_?" asked the stranger quite surprisingly.

"God knows!" said Jaffrey Bretton. "But not that!"

"Yes--but _what_?" pleaded the stranger.

"Search--me!" shrugged Jaffrey Bretton. "That's the whole trouble with 'whooping it up,'" he confided quite frankly. "There's so blamed little to whoop! And it's so soon over! If one only could believe now what the preachers have to say----"

"Preachers?" sniffed the stranger.

"It is, I admit, a sniffy idea," said Jaffrey Bretton, "but undeniably--quaint! Being somewhat to the effect that the pursuit of 'good works,' on the contrary, is an absolutely inexhaustible amusement! Brand-new every [77] morning, I mean! Just as original at night! A perfectly thrilling novelty--even at noon! Heartache in it now and then perhaps but never any headache! Atrophy of the pocket-book perhaps--but never atrophy of the liver!"

"Never--any--headache?" contemplated the stranger. "Not even in the morning, you mean?" Across his face a faint incredulous smile twisted wryly like a twinge of pain. "Oh, now you're joshing!" he said. "In all the world there never was any idea as quaint as that!"

"Oh, nonsense!" snapped Jaffrey Bretton. "I've got an idea of my own that's twice as quaint as that!"

"Such as what?" bridled the stranger.

Across the sweet-scented blur of a fresh cigarette the older man's eyes narrowed suddenly to two mere glints of steel.

"I--I hated the way you kissed my little girl!" he said.

"Y--yes?" stammered the stranger.

"That youngster of mine is such a--little youngster," mused Jaffrey Bretton perfectly evenly. "So totally inexperienced! So [78] desperately affrighted and bewildered already with the untoward happenings of the past week! Personally," he persisted, "I want neither Prude nor Wanton in my family, but either one of them--unfortunately--is made only too easily out of the same sex-shock. In view of which case and under all existing circumstances--you have made it considerably harder, I think, for my little girl to reconstruct normal sex standards while that particular kiss of yours remains the last one in her memory. So I will thank you," said Jaffrey Bretton, "to accompany me now to her drawing-room and show her as best you may how even a man like you can kiss a woman 'Good-night' instead of 'Bad-night!'"

"_What_?" jumped the stranger.

Starkly for an instant he probed Jaffrey Bretton's unflinching eyes. Then rubbing one hand for a single instant across his clammy forehead he followed Jaffrey Bretton out through the plushy green curtain into the aisle.

In the general joggle of the train it was comfortable for each perhaps that the other's footsteps swayed no more, no less, than his [79] own. Even outside Daphne's door the footing was none too certain.

"Let us in!" cried Daphne's father quite peremptorily.

In a vague mist of rumpled gold hair and soft white negligee Daphne opened the door and ushered the two men into her trig little room.

Without a moment's delay Jaffrey Bretton sprung the question that was already on his lips. "Daphne--have you ever been kissed very much?"

Above the cruel shadows that underlined the lovely young eyes, the eyes themselves widened still with blank astonishment of a little girl. But the white teeth that gleamed so brightly in the half-light were caught for the first time in their lives across the crimson line of an over-conscious under lip.

"I said,'Were you ever kissed very much?'" repeated her father a bit tersely.

It was the big, blue, bewildered child's eyes that proved the truth of the red lips answer.

"Why--why once," stammered Daphne perplexedly. "Why once on a boat--when I was a little girl--and--and lost my doll [80] overboard--an--an old lady jumped up and kissed me. Oughtn't she to have?" Heavy with bewilderment only the blue eyes lifted to the stranger's face, winced darkly away again behind their shadowy lashes, and opened wide once more to her father's strangely inscrutable smile.

"Yes--but man-kisses?" probed her father quite mercilessly. "You--you are engaged to be married?"

"I--I _was_ engaged to be married," corrected Daphne. It was the red lips that did all the answering now. "If you mean----" curled the red lips, "if you mean----" Startlingly just above her delicate cheek-bones two spots of red flared suddenly. "It--it just never happened--somehow," she whispered. "Maybe--people don't kiss much before they're married." Into the blue eyes suddenly welled a great blur of tears. "It just--never happened--that's all," quivered the red lips. Quick as a bolt the white teeth shot across the quiver. "Thank God it never happened!" cried the red lips. "I loathe men! I despise them! I----"

"This--this gentleman," said Jaffrey Bretton, [81] quite abruptly, "has come to kiss you 'Good-night!'----"

"_What_?" screamed Daphne. Reeling back against the dark wainscoting she stood there before them with a single slender hand creeping out of its white sleeve towards her throat.

"Oh, I admit," said her father, "that it will not be just the kiss that the old lady gave you when your doll was drowned. Nor yet the kiss that your English Professor was doubtless planning to give you some time. But as kisses go--you will find no fault with it--I am quite sure."

"Why--why, Old-Dad!" gasped Daphne.

Flaming with protest, paling with revulsion, she lifted her stricken eyes to the stranger only to find that his own face was quite as stricken as hers.

Ashy-gray where his flush had been, faintly green around his insolent young nostrils, his eyes seemed fairly begging for mercy. Then quite suddenly he gave a queer, strained little smile, sank down on one knee like a hero in a Play, and picking up the hem of her gown pressed his lips solemnly to it. [82]

"You little--funny--furious--Baby," he began, twitched his queer smile again, and crumpled up at her feet! "Call my man--quick!" he mumbled thickly. "Next car--somewhere. Good-night! _Good-night!_"

But it was not a good night even so! Even what was left of the night was not good! Even after the brief commotion was over and the young stranger had been carried off more or less stumblingly to his own quarters in the hands of a most efficient and formidable valet, Daphne found her car only too frankly a sleepless car. Curling up just as she was in her easiest window-corner with all her pillows crushed behind her back, her knees hunched to her chin in the clasp of her slim white arms, she sat wide-eyed and feverish watching the cindery-smelling Southland go rushing darkly by to meet the North. Long forgotten incidents of her littlest childhood flared hectically back to her! Optical impressions so recent that they had scarcely yet reported to her consciousness seared like flame across her senses! The funny, furry scallop of her first kitten's ear, the jingling tune of a Christmas Cantata, the quite [83] irrelevant weave of the gray silk tie her English professor had worn at his last lecture, the queer white scar that slashed the tipsy stranger's face, some turquoise-colored dishes she had seen once in a shop-window, the crackling rhyme-words "faster"--"disaster" of a new poem she had just planned to write, the horrid crushed feeling of her nose when that Wiltoner boy had caught her so roughly to his breast, white narcissus and scarlet tulips bunched together somewhere in a jet-black basket, and--and always that queer white scar that slashed the tipsy stranger's face! Clacketty-clack-clack-clack of wheels and brakes, rhythm and rumble, rapture of speed, stark-eyed sleeplessness, a Railroad Night! Murky blackness spangled with hamlet lights! Interminable miles of wraith-like fog! A night-heron winging his homeward way suddenly across a bizarre sky striped like a Japanese fan! The faint, sweet, unbelievable scent of orange blossoms! And then the Florida Dawn!

It was the dawn that crept so inquisitively to the hem of Daphne's gown.

With her lovely tousled head cocked ever [84] so slightly to one side Daphne's glance followed the dawn's. Between her perfect eyebrows a curious little frown puckered suddenly. With a quick, raspy catch of her breath she jumped from her couch and bolted for her father's compartment. Digging her fingers quite unceremoniously into his gay-colored flannel shoulders she roused him from his dreams.

"Old-Dad!" she cried, "I can't sleep!"

"Very few people can," growled her father. "So why fuss about it?"

"Yes--but Old-Dad!" persisted the girl. Her teeth were chattering and from hand to feet a dreadful convulsive chill seemed to be racking her suddenly.

"For Heaven's sake, what's the matter?" cried her father.

"It's that--kiss!" quivered Daphne.

"Oh, shucks!" relaxed her father. "Forget it! It was a bit rough, I know! But remember--you had no right--at all--to go foraging into a tipsy man's smoking-room!"

"Smoking-room?" gasped Daphne. "Why--why I'd forgotten all about _that_! The--the kiss, I mean----" her eyes were wide [85] with horror, "the kiss, I mean----" White as a ghost suddenly she lifted to her father's eyes the filmy hem of her gown where in two faint crimson splashes across one corner a man had stenciled the bow of his lips with his own life-blood.

"The _deuce_!" cried her father, and jumping into his wrapper rang precipitously for the porter.

"The young man who was--who was sick last night the one that had the hemorrhage--what about him?" he demanded of the first white-coated Darky who came running.

"Is--is he dead?" whispered Daphne.

"The young man what had the hemorrhage," confided the Darky, "he done gone leap from the train."

"What?" cried Jaffrey Bretton.

Enraptured by the excitement the Darky ripped his somber face in a white grin from ear to ear.

"He sure did, Sah!" he attested genially. "Back thar jes' as we was leavin' the water tank it was! More'n an hour back I reckon!" With a sudden elongation of his grin that threatened to separate the whole upper part [86] of his face from the lower he rallied himself for his real news. "Was you by any chance, sah," he grinned, "the gentleman what owned the cat-hound in the baggage car?"

"Cat-hound?" flared Jaffrey Bretton. "I've got a thousand-dollar slate-colored hound in the baggage car if that's what you mean?"

"You ain't done got him now," regretted the Darky. "It was him that jumps off first at the water tank. The cat was yeller. One of them sort of swamp cats that----"

With a cry of real dismay Jaffrey Bretton pushed the Darky aside and started for the door.

"'Twon't do you no good now, sah," protested the Darky. "It was more'n an hour ago I reckon and the Captain of this 'ere train he don't stop nothing for no dog."

"No, of course not!" cried Jaffrey Bretton, "But we've got to do something! The swamp country----"

"Yes, sah, that's the trouble with these 'ere hound-dogs," reflected the Darky. "They runs till they busts. And when they busts they bogs down. And jes' as soon as they bogs [87] down Mr. Alligator or Mr. Little Ole Mocassin snake he----It was when the young gentleman sees the swamp that he jumps. Tell the folks not to worry, he hollers. Tell 'em this little ole good works 'speriment am only just begun! Was _you_ his folks?" brightened the Darky.

"No!" flared Daphne.

"Yes!" said Jaffrey Bretton. "Go get me a telegraph blank quick!" he ordered. "Find out what the last station back was! And the next one ahead!"

Expeditiously the Darky plunged through the door, then swung back for one more sentence.

"There was some gentlemens down here las' year what lost their hound-dog. Jes' two hours it was and when they foun' him he was all buzzard-et."

"Hush your mouth!" said Jaffrey Bretton.

"But, Old-Dad," shivered Daphne, "what about the--the man?"

"Men can look after themselves!" frowned her father, "and if they can't, maybe they'll get another chance, who knows? But a dog, poor little lover. All that dumb quivering [88] miracle of love, trust, shrewdness, sinew, silk. If _he_ doesn't get the chance to live out the measure of even his stingy little day----"

"Yes, but Old-Dad," reasoned Daphne, "it was Creep-Mouse's own idea wasn't it--this jumping off to chase the cat?"

"Hush _your_ mouth!" said Jaffrey Bretton. To cover the very real emotion that hid behind the irritability he began at once with the stub of a pencil and the back of an envelope to compose a telegram for the stranger.

"Thanks," he wrote. "Please communicate any news to J. Bretton, Hotel-------"

Then quite abruptly he jumped up and started after the porter. "Why, what an idiot I am!" he called back from the door way. "We don't even know the chap's name!"

From under lashes that seemed extraordinarily heavy to lift Daphne glanced up a bit askance at her father.

"His name is Sheridan Kaire," she said.

Swinging sharply round in his tracks her father stood eyeing her with frank astonishment. [89]

"Well, I'd like to know," he demanded, "how _you_ happen to know what his name is?"

"He--he sent me his card," said Daphne. This time her eyelashes were quite unmistakably too heavy to lift. "At the hotel, I mean," she faltered, "three or four nights ago. He sent me orchids. He sent me candy. He sent me----"

"Do you mean," said her father, "that this man has been following you for days?"

"Yes," said Daphne.

"And--and what did you do with these--these offerings?" asked her father.

"Why, I didn't know just what to do with them," stammered Daphne. "I was so frightened--I--I gave them to the bell boy."

"Do you mind telling me," quickened her father, "just why if you were frightened or troubled you wouldn't call upon your most natural protector?"

Like the fluffy edges of two feather fans Daphne's lashes fringed on her cheeks.

"This father and daughter game is such a new one to me," she said. "I've lived so much with boarding school girls--I--I didn't know fathers were people you told things to, I [90] thought they were people that you kept things from!" Very faintly around the tremulous young mouth, very briefly behind the dark lashes a little smile signaled.

"Take off that gown!" ordered her father quite abruptly, "and wrap yourself up in that big coat of mine! And wait here till I come back!"

"What time is it?" shivered Daphne.

"Four o'clock," said her father and was gone.

When he reappeared ten minutes later with a yellow envelope flapping in his hand Daphne was still standing just where he had left her though obediently bundled up now in the big tweed coat.

"We are all idiots!" affirmed her father. "Everybody on the train is an idiot! Here's this message been stuck up in the dining car since nine o'clock last night and no one had wit enough to find us!"

"Is it from--Creep-Mouse?" brightened Daphne.

"Silly!" cried her father. "Creep-Mouse didn't jump off till after midnight! This is for you!" [91]

"For--me?" questioned Daphne. With incredulous fingers she took the yellow envelope and slit it end from end.

"Why, it's from John," she whispered. "John Burnarde--Mr. John Burnarde." Swaying a little where she stood she bent her bright head to the message. Then white once more to the lips she handed the page to her father.

"Read it to me yourself," said her father. "You know the man's accents and emphases better than I do and it won't make any sense to me unless I can hear the man's voice in it."

Once again the bright head bent to the page.

"To Miss Daphne Bretton," began the young voice as one quotes some precious-memoried phrase. "While your blessed letter completely relieves mind it cannot unfortunately relieve certain distressing complications of----" As though breaking its way through lips turned suddenly to ice the sweet enunciation began quite palpably to crisp around the edges of its words. "Certain distressing complications of this most unhappy situation. Forwarding to you all love and confidence am yet tied hand and foot against immediate action. Letter follows.

"T. D." [92]

"Which being interpreted?" questioned her father.

"Which being interpreted," rallied Daphne, "is academic for nothing doing.----"

"U--m--m," mused her father, "and what does 'T. D.' stand for?"

"'Teacher-Dear,'" flushed Daphne. "It was just a sort of a joke between us. I never somehow quite got round to calling him 'John.'"

As though lost in the most abstract reflection Jaffrey Bretton cocked his head on one side.

"It's a good telegram," he said.

"Oh, a perfectly good telegram," acquiesced Daphne. With a curiously old gesture of finality she turned aside.

"So in this fashion ends passion," she murmured.

"What do you know about passion?" quizzed her father.

"It rhymes with 'fashion,'" said Daphne.

For an instant only from blue eyes to black eyes and black eyes to blue again the baffling, sphynxlike mystery of youth defied the baffling, sphynxlike mystery of experience. [93] Then quite abruptly her father reached out and cupped the little white quivering chin in the hollow of his hand.

"What did you _think_ your lover would do, Daphne?" he smiled. "Tear down the college chapel? Set fire to the gymnasium? Cast all the faculty into dungeons--and come riding forth to claim you on a coal black charger decked with crimson trappings?"

"No, of course not," said Daphne. "Only----"

"Yes, that's just it," hurried her father. "'Only' boys do things like that! Only first-love, the young, wild free-lance peddler ready and able any moment, God bless him, to dump down his whole tip-cartful of trinkets at the feet of the first lady-fair who meets his fancy! But a _grown man_, Daphne, is a corporation! No end of other people's investments tied up with him! No end of rules and obligations encompassing him about! Truly, little girl, there are mighty few grown men who could proffer honorable succor even to their belovedest on such short notice. Truly, little girl, taken all in all, I think your John is doing pretty well. [94] Maybe for all you know your John owes money!"

"He does," nodded Daphne. "There were some queer old editions of something he persuaded the college to buy last year. They turned out not to be genuine or something and John feels he ought to refund on it."

"And maybe there's an old father somewhere?"

"It's an old mother," quivered Daphne.

"And maybe the college president herself didn't make things any too easy for him!"

"Miss Merriwayne's crazy about him," quickened Daphne. "All the girls say so! Everybody----"

"U--m--m," mused her father. "Well, I think you'll hear from him again!"

"Yes, I think I'll hear from him again," monotoned Daphne. Quite suddenly her teeth began to chatter and the eyes that lifted to his were like the eyes of a frightened fawn.

"I feel so little," she whispered. "Even in this big coat I feel so little--and so cold! I never sat in anybody's lap," she stammered desperately, "and--and as long as you didn't like my--my mother I don't suppose you've [95] ever held anybody in yours. But perhaps--maybe----" With a little smothered cry her hands crept up to her father's shoulders. "Oh, if you just could hold me till breakfast time!" she begged, "or just till the coffee's ready."

Flushing like an embarrassed school-boy her father caught her up in his arms and sank back into the narrow angular corner of plush and wood with the little unfamiliar form snuggled close on his breast.

"Why--why, you don't weigh anything!" he faltered.

"No, I'm not as fat as I was last week," conceded Daphne. Like a puppy dog settling down for a nap she stirred once or twice in her nest. "Do you think of any little song you could sing?" she asked.

"Nothing except:

'Fifteen men on a dead man's chest-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!----'"

began her father in a cheerful tenor.

"No, I wouldn't care for that," sighed Daphne. [96]

"Why, it's from Stevenson himself!" argued her father.

"Never mind," snuggled Daphne. "Maybe I can think of one myself."

Peering down a moment later through the bright tickly blur of her hair her father noticed suddenly that her lips were moving.

"Oh, you're not praying, are you?" he squirmed. "Oh, I do hope you're not one of those people who makes his spiritual toilet in public! Dear me! Dear me! To brush your soul night and morning is no more, of course, than any neat person would do. But in public----"

"I wasn't praying," said Daphne. "I was making a little poem."

"You seem to be rather prone to make little poems," murmured her father.

"Would you like to hear this one?" offered Daphne.

"Oh, I don't mind," said her father.

"All right," quivered Daphne. "It's about Love."

"So I supposed," mused her father.

"And death," confided Daphne. [97]

"I wouldn't wonder at all," admitted her father.

"And its name?" puzzled Daphne. "Oh, I guess it hasn't any name! It just begins! This is it:

'Oh, the little rose that died, How it tried, oh, how it tried Just to grow a little stronger, Just to live a little longer, Snatching sunshine, sipping rain Till the June should come again! Didn't want to be a tree, Didn't envy you or me, Asked no favor ere life's close But the chance to be a rose, Oh, that little rose that died, How it tried! Oh, how it tried!----'"

"U--m--m," mused her father. "But I thought you said it was about 'Love.' This is all about 'roses.'"

"But it _is_ about 'Love!'" flared Daphne. "The rose part is just--just figurative! You have to do that in poetry! Make most everything figurative, or else it wouldn't be--be delicate." Quite palpably her upper lip began to tremble. "Why, didn't you like it?" [98] she whispered. "Didn't you like it at all, I mean?"

"Oh, yes," hurried her father, "I liked it very much, oh very! Though personally on these crape-y poems I must confess I like some jolly refrain added like 'Yo-ho and a bottle of rum!----'"

"Why--Old-Dad!" gasped Daphne. Sitting bolt upright, her cheeks blazing, she stared aghast at him.

"Oh, of course, you've never been in love!" she cried. "But I tell you when you're sitting all alone with your love-secret in a whole recitation roomful of girls and--and _he_ comes in--so lithe--so beautiful--and smiles through everybody--right at you--and--and then begins to read--it's Shakespeare, you know

'How like a winter hath my absence been From Thee----'

Oh, Old-Dad, if you could only hear him read!"

Before the sudden twinkle in her father's eyes she reverted equally suddenly into sheer [99] childishness again and began to pound him quite familiarly with her small fists.

"Oh, you're just teasing me!" she laughed. "You naughty, naughty--Old-Dad! Oh, very well then, here's another poem for you! You'll love this one! I made it up last night It's all about you!"

"Shoot!" said her father.

Re-dramatized in that single instant to the role of a poet she straightened up very formally. Back to her breast crept the quivering little hands. Her eyes were blurred with tears. "The name of this poem," she said, "is 'The Word that God Forgot to Make.' But if that's too long I could, of course, call it just 'The Miracle.' See what you think.

'Out of panic and pain, out of unspeakable disaster, (Oh rhyme, oh rune, oh rhythm itself, come faster, come faster!) Out of all this I say Fate has found me my father! But where? Where? In earth or air? From sky to sea? From you to me? Where shall I find a rhyme for "father"? I whose only speech is rhyme, I who have so little time. How can I in other ways sound my Daddy's glorious praise? Beauty, Splendor, Brains, Perfection----'" [100]

"Oh, I say!" wriggled her father. "Is that all?"

Wilting down on his breast again he heard her swallow pretty hard several times before her muffled answer came.

"It's--it's all," she said, "except, of course, the refrain 'Yo-ho,' etc."

Chuckling softly to himself for a moment her father sat staring off across the crown of her head at the shifting car-window landscape of orange groves, palm trees, and pine.

"Couldn't you pat me a little?" came the sweet, muffled voice again.

"I darsn't," said her father. "If I should unclasp a single hand you'd go bumpety-bump on the floor."

"O--h," sighed Daphne, "but couldn't you even--pat me with your voice?"

"'Pat you with my voice?'" puzzled her father. With a quiver of muscles his strong arms tightened round her. "Why, you poor baby," he cried, "you poor lonesome little kiddie! You----"

"Why does everybody think I'm so little?" protested Daphne. With considerable effort she struggled up again, "You--and John [101] Burnarde--and the--and the Kissing Man! Every one of you called me 'a baby.' But that Wiltoner boy--at the dance that night," she faltered, "he treated me as though I was quite grown up and real. Right in the midst of a dance it was he asked me about bread machines. Asked my advice about bread machines, I mean! And I loved it!"

"Did you ever see a bread machine?" quizzed her father.

"N--o," admitted Daphne, "but it sounds so real! But what I want to know," she hurried on quite irrelevantly, "is about this place--this wild, desert-islandy sort of place that we're going to. Will that seem _real_?"

"Very real," promised her father.

"Tents?" questioned Daphne.

"Yes," said her father.

"What will there be to eat?" brightened Daphne.

"Oh, canned goods," shrugged her father, "and warm oranges and grape-fruit, and heaps of salt pork, of course, and all the fresh fish we have strength to land--Spanish mackerel, sea trout, sharks."

"Not sharks?" thrilled Daphne. [102]

"Ah, of course, we don't have to eat them," confessed her father.

"And people?" wilted Daphne again. "Will there have to be people?"

"Oh, only four or five probably," laughed her father, "and even those usually are scattered twenty-five or fifty miles apart. Oh, of course, now and then," he admitted in all honesty, "some gay Northern houseboat comes floating by. But mostly--somehow, all that part of the land, or rather of the water, seems inhabited by people who have made mistakes--made real mistakes, I mean--argued not wisely but too well with their mothers-in-law, or overdrawn their bank accounts with the butt of a pistol rather than with the point of a pen, or had a bit of 'rough play' somewhere upstate with an over-sensitive sheriff. We're going to have, for instance, a 'Lost Man' for a cook. Nice distinguished looking old city-spoken derelict who can't remember who he is, so most happily for him he can't remember what _his_ mistake was. And on the next key just below us, twenty miles or so, there's an outlaw who killed two revenue officers 'up North in Alabama' [103] somewhere. And inland just behind us there's a rather good-looking woman who's gone batty on the subject of red. Can't bear red, it seems, and has come down there to wallow her nerves in the all-green jungle."

Big and dark and blue, Daphne widened her eyes to her father's.

"You're not fooling _any_, Old-Dad?" she asked.

"Not fooling any," said her father.

Blackly for an instant the heavy lashes shadowed down across the delicately tinted cheeks. Then quite abruptly a real smile flashed from eyes to lips.

"Oh, Old-Dad!" cried Daphne. "_Would_ you mind if I touched your--beautiful hair?"

"Oh, shucks!" dodged her father.

But Daphne's little hands had already reached their goal.

"Oh, Old-Dad--how soft!" she gloated. "How white! How _thick_! But, oh goodness--isn't it _hot_?"

"On the contrary," smiled her father with a slightly twisted eyebrow. "On the contrary--it is an Ice Cap prescribed by Fate for [104] what has doubtless been an over-feverish youth."

Solemnly for an instant Daphne considered the answer.

"Which being interpreted?" she questioned.

With a little sharp catch of his breath her father caught her suddenly back to his breast.

"Which being interpreted," he laughed, "means:

'Didn't want to be a freak, Had no hunch to sing or speak, Couldn't be clever if he tried, So have it dyed! _Oh_, have it dyed!----'" [105]