Chapter IV: Part II: 106 (2)

"Oh, I forgot," cried Daphne. "Why, of course we mustn't run!" All the excitement in her turned suddenly to tears. "After all," she confided impetuously, "running away on an island isn't so awfully satisfying! No matter how far you ran it would always be just [160] 'round and round!'" Compassionately she turned back towards him.

"Oh, I don't know!" snapped the young man. "Some islands, you know, aren't quite as round and round as others! This one for instance----" With a spring he was at her side, his queer, fascinating face thrust close to hers, his vibrant hands thrilling her shoulders. "You--little--blessed baby!" he cried, "if you're really looking for an adventure--let's make one! But while we're about it--for Heaven's sake let's make it a whopper! Let's--let's pretend that you are a beggar maid!" he laughed excitedly, "and that I am a fairy prince!" Once again he flashed his lantern across her lovely disheveledness. "'Pon my soul," he exulted, "you look heaps more like a beggar maid than I do like a fairy prince! But if I could prove that I was _your_ fairy prince----"

"Yes--if you could prove that you were my fairy prince----" laughed Daphne.

"Pumpkin coach--and all?" cried the man. His hands on her shoulders were like electric shocks.

"Pumpkin coach and all!" whispered [161] Daphne. To save her soul she could not have told just why she whispered.

With an odd little smile the young man released his hold on her shoulders and snatched her hand again.

"Then come quick!" he cried.

Maybe it wasn't "running," but it was very much like it! Zig-zag across the beach, up through the palmetto thicket, clattering across an unexpected pile of old tin cans, out into the soft sand again of a sheltered cove, a coral harbor, where blazing with lights like a Christmas tree a big house-boat lay at its moorings.

"There!" cried the young man, "the pumpkin coach!"

"Why--wherever in the world did it come from?" gasped Daphne. Her heart was beating so that she could scarcely speak. "Wherever--in the world?"

Swaying a little on her feet her shoulder brushed ever so slightly against her companion's, and she turned to find herself snatched into the steel-sinewed arms, the relentless dove-voiced urgency of the first passion she had ever seen! This was no hoydenish [162] tussle with an unnerved man who thought you were a panther! This was no snub-nosed smother against the breast of a boy who was trying to keep you from screaming! This was no idyl of the Class Room, no airy persiflage of the poets! But Passion itself! Raw Passion, too! A thing tender, terrifying, beyond her wildest dreams of tenderness of terror! The desperate, determinate, all but irresistible pleading of a man who was fighting if not for life itself, at least for the last joy that his life would ever know!

"Oh, little girl!" he pleaded, "I'm mad about you! Do you doubt it? Absolutely mad!" His question marks were kisses, his exclamation points, more kisses. "Ever since that night, only six weeks ago, was it, when I stumbled on you in the hotel? I was drunk then, wasn't I? Well, I'm sober enough now! But drunk or sober there hasn't been a minute since, day or night, when I haven't been trying to follow you! Give me your lips!"

"I won't!" said Daphne.

"I tell you I can't live without you," urged the man. "I won't live without you! Your father's quite right, I haven't got a whole lot [163] of time, but think how we'd pack it! Hawaii, Japan, the moon if you'd crave it! 'Eat, drink and be merry'--and to-morrow you still live! It's only I that have got to die! You shall love me, I say! You _shall_! Merciful God! Am I to live like a spoiled child all my days and be robbed at this last of the only real thing I ever wanted?"

"My--my father----" struggled Daphne. It was a struggle of soul as well as body.

"Your father is a real man," conceded the vibrant, compelling voice, "but he's only a real man, and with a real man's needs. There's bound to be another woman sometime. There's another woman even now you say? What place then is left for you? But come with me, I say, and as long as there's breath left in my body you shall be first, last and only! And after that----" he shivered ever so slightly, "Mrs. Sheridan Kaire won't have to worry, I guess, overmuch about anything. Oh, I've been a devil, I know! I don't deny it! I----"

"You--you mean you've kissed other women?" cried Daphne, "Like--this?"

"Yes--several--other--women," winced [164] the insatiate lips, "but not like this! Or this! Or _this_!"

"I won't give you _my_ lips," said Daphne.

"You little spit-fire!" exulted the man. "You--you young panther! _You blessed little pal_! You and I together--and the world well lost!"

With a catch of his breath that was almost a sob he tilted her chin towards the light and stared deep into her young unfathomable eyes. His own eyes were hot with tears, and the scar across his cheek twitched oddly at the dimple.

"Wanted--to--be as wild as an aeroplane, did you?" he questioned with extraordinary gentleness. "And they crucified you for a wanton in the Halls of Learning! Also in the Sunday supplement next to the Comic Section!" At the answering shiver of her body something keener than tears glinted suddenly in his eyes. But his voice never lifted from its gentleness. "And they always will crucify you, little girl," he said, "in this fuddy-duddy boarding school world you've been living in! As long as you live, little girl, some prude will be mincing forward [165] from time to time to see if the nails are holding the cross itself still in the full glare. But the bunch I run with, little girl, would rate you as a saint! Call it a wild bunch if you want to, but wouldn't you rather be laughed at for a saint than spat at for a devil?"

"Y-e-s," quivered Daphne.

"Then come!" said the man.

Daphne did not stir.

Once again the vibrant fingers stroked along her pulsing wrist. "What you need," crooned the persuasive voice, "for what ails--you, is to whoop things up a bit, not whoop 'em down. Which statement," he grinned, "though it may not spell righteousness, remains at least the truth. So come!" he quickened. "And if you want to go wild, we'll go wild! And if you want to go tame, we'll go tame! Heaven or hell, I don't care--as long as it's together!"

From the glittering house-boat in the little bay a bell tolled out its resonant news that the hour was eight o'clock.

"Hurry up!" urged the man with the faintest possible rasp of anxiety in his voice. "For Heaven's sake if we're going let's go while [166] the going is good! No bungling! No fiasco! All I want from you," he turned and confided with sudden intensity, "is your promise that if we do start you'll see the thing through! My honor not to make a fool of you pledged against your honor not to make a fool of me! Girls are so unreliable."

"'Girls?'" winced Daphne.

From the glittering house-boat a woman's laugh rang out with curious congruity.

But when Daphne winced this time, she was in a lover's arms again, encompassed by a lover's tenderness, coaxed by a lover's voice.

"Oh, I don't pretend for a moment," crooned the persuasive voice, "that I've got just the crowd on board that I would have chosen for this particular sort of get-away. Nevertheless----" With a chuckle that would have been brutal if it had not been so exultant he bent down and brushed his lips across Daphne's throbbing temple. "Nevertheless," he chuckled, "of all the crowds that ever crowded anybody, this one represents perhaps the one most ready to eat from my hand. I haven't got much sense, it seems, nor yet a long life, but what I have got," he [167] laughed out suddenly, "I've got for fair! And that's money!" In a silence that was almost sinister he stood for an instant staring off at the house-boat's gay-lanterned outline against the dark fluttery palms. "Thought they'd yank me back from all this did they?" he questioned hotly. "Back to an old Board Meeting in a New York snow-storm? Not much! 'If you want your damned old library,' I wired 'em, 'come ahead down here and thrash it out where a fellow can argue without frost biting his tongue, and be catching a tarpon or two on the side at the same time.' Wired 'em tickets and everything, the whole damned outfit, architect and all! Heap-sight easier though than going back to New York! But if I don't want to give 'em the library," he grinned with sudden malice, "I don't have to, you know--even now! There's nothing in my father's will, I mean, that compels me to give it. My father's will merely suggests that I give it, advises me to give it, 'with such subsequent moneys,' he quoted mockingly, 'as may comprise my estate' at the time I cash in. But of all the big stiffs," he shuddered, "that I ever saw, [168] Claudia Merriwayne leads them all, not even excepting her new Dean or her Oldest Trustee!"

"Claudia--Merriwayne?" gasped Daphne.

"Oh, of course, in my day," persisted Kaire, "I have had grace at my table, and some disgrace now and then! But Greek? And Latin? and Doric columns? And the 'influence of concrete on young character?' _Why where are you_?" he turned and called suddenly through the darkness. Gropingly his arms reached out and snatched her to him again, and for the first time she yielded limply, and lay like a bruised rose against his breast. "Why, I can't even hear you breathing!" he cried. "Why, you might be dead, you are so still! And your little hands are like ice! And----"

"Did--you--say--that--that Miss Claudia Merriwayne--was on that boat out there--with you?" faltered Daphne.

"Why, yes," shrugged the man, "I think that's the lady's name. Why--why, shouldn't she be there? All the colleges are closed now, aren't they, for the Christmas holidays? Why, surely you don't mean that you care?" he [169] laughed. "That you don't like my having the dame?"

"_Care_?" hooted Daphne. Like a wraith suddenly electrified all the fire, the nerve, the sparkle, the recklessness came surging back to her!

Through every quiver of his overwrought nerves he sensed the strange almost psychic change come over her, a brighter gold to the hair, a deeper blue to the eyes, a quicker pulse in the slender throat. Every tender line of her thrown suddenly into italics, every minor chord crashing into crescendo! If she had been beautiful in the rompish escapade of the beach, and the single wistful silence of the moment before, her beauty was absolutely maddening to him now.

With a little quick cry that was almost like a challenge she reached up and touched him on the shoulder. It was her first caress.

"Oh, all right! I'll go with you!" she cried excitedly. "But on one condition only!"

"A hundred conditions!" quickened the man, "so long as you make them before we start!"

"It's about our 'start' that I'm making this [170] one!" cried Daphne. Her flesh was flaming with blushes but neither her heart nor her mind knew just why she blushed. "It's--it's about your drunkenness!" she flamed. "After we're man and wife, with my faults as well as yours, we'll have to do the best we can, think it out, fight it out, maybe we can get somebody to help us! But until we're man and wife, I must not be embarrassed--or humiliated! Badness that knows that it's badness, that's one thing! But silliness that doesn't know it's silliness, I just couldn't stand it, that's all!" Shrewdly her young eyes narrowed to his. "You're--you're quite right what you said on the beach just now! No one can guarantee his ending! But it's an awful goose, Sheridan Kaire, who doesn't guarantee his start! So if I pledge you, Sheridan Kaire," flamed the proud little face, "that once started I _will_ see the whole thing through, it is pledged on the understanding that you will protect the--the dignity of that start?"

Across the man's impatient face a dark unhappy flush showed suddenly. [171]

"I get you!" he said. "I will be very careful about my drinking."

"But as to a pledge from you," cried Daphne, "that you wouldn't back out and make a fool of _me_--why, it just never would have occurred to me to ask it! It doesn't occur to me even now! Why--why should you make a fool of me?" she questioned. "Why, how could you make a fool of me? You love me, don't you?" she triumphed.

"I--love--you," said the man.

"Oh, all right, then!" cried Daphne. "'Nuff said! Let's go!"

Snatching a silver whistle from his white flannel pocket the man blew sharply once--twice--three times. Simultaneously with the signal a slight commotion was visible on the house-boat.

"They'll be over for us right away," said the man. "Just as soon as they can get the little boat launched."

With her small hand slipped into his, Daphne stood pawing the sand like a pony while she watched the operations.

"Will it be--_my_ house-boat?" she thrilled. [172]

"It will be your house-boat," smiled the man.

"And my gay lanterns?" danced Daphne.

"And your gay lanterns," smiled the man.

"And my money?" cried Daphne. "And my library?"

"And your _everything_," smiled the man.

With an absolutely elfish cry Daphne threw back her head and began to laugh.

"Oh, I'm not a bit afraid to go with you!" she laughed. "Maybe I ought to be! But I'm not! I'm not! Maybe it's because I'm too excited to be afraid! Maybe it's because," she flamed, "I am never going to be afraid of anything--ever any more! Oh, I'm an--awful kid," she paled and flamed again, "I don't even know just what marriage is! But--" Wild as the humor of nymph or faun the queer little cry burst from her lips again. "But I know I must never deceive you!" she cried. "I know that much at least! So--so maybe you won't want to take me," she cried, "when I tell you that Miss Claudia Merriwayne was the President who expelled me from college!"

"_What_?" snapped Sheridan Kaire. "The [173] devil you say! _What_? Oh, so that's why you were willing to come? Just to get even? Just to----Now I must have been some thick," he frowned, "not to have sized up that that was the bunch who expelled you from college. Thicker even than I thought I was! Seeing only your picture in the paper, sizing up only your name!" Then quite suddenly he put back his head and began to laugh. "Of all the comic operas!" he hooted. "Of all the Heaven-sent situations! We'll give them their old library or not just as you say," he hooted. "Well----" Then with a gesture that seemed to be all ardor and no gentleness he reached out and drew her back to him. "I don't care why you come," he cried, "as long as you come!"

"Oh, won't it be glorious," danced Daphne, "to surprise them so! I'm going to pull my hair way down over my face like this and this," she illustrated with eager fingers, "so that they won't know me at all until I'm ready--I'll look so wild!"

"Everything's going to be glorious!" said the man. "H-st! Here comes the launch!"

Like an excited child Daphne ran to meet [174] it. Close at her shoulder followed the man. Glancing back at him swiftly through the bright maze of her hair, a single challenge, half mischievous, half defiant, flashed from her lips and eyes.

"Glorious! Glorious! _Glorious_!" she laughed. "But I will--never give you my lips!"

All defiance and no mischief, the man's laugh answered the challenge.

"I sha'n't--care what--you give me," he said, "when I'm once fixed so that I can take what I want!"

With a swish of keel and sand the little launch landed at their feet.

The nattily uniformed sailor who manned the launch was too well trained in his master's service to show a flicker of surprise or curiosity concerning his master's errands. But a master's weakness being only too often the man's, the only blunder of his ten years service slipped now from his faintly alcoholic lips.

"Good evening, Dighton!" nodded his master. [175]

"Good evening, sir!" saluted the man with punctilious formality.

"Here, fix those cushions a little better!" pointed his master as he helped the vague white figure into the boat. "Here, Dighton, give the lady a hand!"

Lifting his eyes for the first time to the little lady's laughing face peering out half-affrighted from her bright disheveled hair, Dighton the man gave a purely involuntary gasp, and stumbled a bit clumsily over some shadowy obstacle.

"That's all right, Dighton," laughed his master. "She's got the looks to knock most any man over! Your new Mistress, Dighton!" he called out proudly.

"Your--your new Mistress?" bungled the man's addled lips.

Scarcely sensing the unhappy twist, but lashed like a whip by the single expletive and ghastly silence that followed it, Daphne curled up in her cushions and prattled her excitement into space.

"Oh, what a night!" she cried. "Oh, what tall cocoanut palms! Oh, what bright stars! Oh--oh--oh, whatever in the world shall I [176] do about clothes?" she questioned precipitously. Gayer and gayer her little laugh flashed from her lips. "Why, just for common humanity," she gloated, "Miss Merriwayne will have to lend me a nightie! And shoes and stockings! And a dress! Oh, won't I look funny in Miss Merriwayne's great big clothes?" Dismayed at the unbroken silence she turned and stared up wondering-eyed at the furious, frowning man beside her. "Why--what's the matter Sheridan Kaire?" she whispered. "You look so--sort of--as though your face hurt? Does it?" With her eyes drawn as though by some irresistible fascination to the pale zig-zagged outline of his scar, she asked the one childish question that was left on her lips. "Whoever hurt you so?" she questioned. "Was it in a--a brave war or something? How ever in the world could----"

"Hush!" snarled the man. "For God's sake, hush!" Then in passionate contrition he bent down through the darkness and touched his lips to her finger tips. "Forgive me," he pleaded, "my nerves _are_ jumpy!"

Brightly the house-boat loomed up before [177] them. In another moment they would be alongside.

Once more the man bent down to the little figure beside him.

"Just once," he demanded, "from your own lips, I want to hear it! It wasn't I who incited you to run away--was it? It was your own idea, I mean? You'd already made up your mind for some sort of a running--before you stumbled on me? I'm simply the direction you decided to run in?" For a single instant across his worldly young face the question of his own responsibility flecked his lean features into an almost exaggerated asceticism. "I'm not specially anxious, you know, to pose as a seducer of the young."

"As a what?" questioned Daphne.

Then softly thudding into the big house boat's side the little launch finished its journey, and only the chance of laughter was left to either the man or the girl.

"Bang!" flew a little ladder to the launch. "Creak!" strained a rope. With a patter of soft-soled feet a half dozen white-sailored forms came running! A dark blue officer peered down from the deck! An extra [178] lantern flashed! And another! And another! From some far shadowed corner a piano and violin swept blithely into melody!

Then through hands and lips infinitely more discreet than Dighton's, but eyes not nearly so blank, the sparkling, spirited, utterly disheveled, utterly unexplainable little figure followed the master of the house-boat to the luxuriant, softly lighted cabin, where gathered round an almost priceless mahogany table two frowning, serious-minded women, and three frowning serious-minded men sat pouring over a great flare of blue prints.

"Nothing," affirmed President Merriwayne's clear, incisive voice at the moment, "nothing--I believe, so affects the human mind as a noble appearance."

With a laugh about as mirthless as a maniac's, but a humor fairly convulsed with joy, Sheridan Kaire took a single glance at Daphne, and drew her into the room.

"Behold, Ladies and Gentlemen," he announced, "my Pirate Queen! The future arbiter of my fortunes!"

From the priceless mahogany table five chairs jerked back as though by a single thud. [179]

Five pairs of eyes flared suddenly on Daphne, lapped up the beauty of her, the disheveledness, the audacity, and blinked their lids with astonishment.

"Is--is it dramatics?" quavered the older lady's fine patrician voice. "What a--what a child!"

"Dramatics?" bridled Miss Merriwayne. As though the unrecognized figure before her was deaf, dumb, blind, she lifted her lorgnette in frowning scrutiny. "Some of the poor whites down here are extraordinarily good looking," she conceded, "but don't you really think, Mr. Kaire, that your jest is just a little--little----"

"Jest?" said Sheridan Kaire.

From the deck just above their heads the thud of a dragging anchor rope sounded suddenly, and the sharp cry of orders passed from one sailor to another.

"In ten minutes at least," laughed Kaire, "or in five, Heaven knows if we can make it, we shall _all_ be off!" With a quite unnecessary air of diablerie he turned and chucked Daphne under the chin.

From the further side of the lamp, beyond [180] the unmistakable architect, beyond the unmistakable trustee, a figure not yet distinct, rose slowly into view. It was John Burnarde. Very courteously he advanced towards his host. Not a muscle of his face twitched, not an accent of his voice either lifted or fell.

"Truly, Mr. Kaire," he suggested smilingly as one might have smiled at a maniac, "don't you think perhaps it might be better to finish the discussion outside? No matter what a bachelor may contend his rights to be as regards his personal affairs with women, you will hardly insist, I think, on pursuing said affair while my mother and President Merriwayne remain your guests? Surely, tomorrow, when you are more yourself again----"

"I am not drunk!" flared Sheridan Kaire, "and what's more you haven't seen me drunk this whole week more than once! Or, at most, twice!"

"Drunk or sober," said John Burnarde quite unflinchingly, "I request that you do not involve us in any of your escapades!"

"Escapades?" scoffed Kaire. "You----"

From the shadow to which she had partly [181] retreated, Daphne sprang out, and brushed the bright hair from her eyes.

"Why John!" she cried, "don't you know me? It's Daphne! Daphne Bretton!"

"_What_?" staggered the new dean. "You? Why, Daphne! Why----"

"What difference is it to you who it is?" interposed Kaire a bit roughly.

But before anybody could answer the President herself had jumped to her feet.

"_You_, Daphne Bretton?" she gasped accusingly. "_You_? What--are--you--doing here? Isn't it enough that you have disgraced your college without adding this fresh escapade to your career? What--what wild, unprincipled doings are you up to now? Is there no shame in you? No----" With an imperious gesture she turned to her host. "Surely, Mr. Kaire," she implored him, "you are not in earnest about this girl? Are we really to understand for one moment that you contemplate allying yourself with this girl? Putting the stewardship of your great fortune in her hands? A girl with such a history? A girl with such a character?"

"Miss Bretton's character is not under [182] discussion here," said John Burnarde decisively.

"Once again," snapped Sheridan Kaire, "I ask what affair Daphne Bretton's character is to you?"

"It's this to me," began John Burnarde with his tortured eyes fairly raking the beloved young face before him. ('What _was she_ doing here?' ached every pulse in his body. So lovely, so irresponsible, so strangely all alone with this notorious young roue.) "It's this to me," he repeated dully, glanced back for a single worried second at his frail mother's dreadful pallor, and crossed his arms on his breast. "_What_ is it to me, Daphne?" he asked.

"It's this to him," said Daphne fearlessly. "He liked me a little, but when the trouble came, it had to stop. It wasn't his fault! My father said it wasn't his fault! There were merely other things--other people, that had to be considered. It's all right. It's quite all right!" Defiantly the little chin lifted. "Quite all right! I'm going--away--with Sheridan Kaire!"

With a piteously vain effort John Burnarde's mother struggled to reach her crutch [183] and lapsed helplessly back into her chair again. Only her white up-turned face betrayed her shock.

But for once in his life John Burnarde did not notice his mother.

"Oh, no--no!" he cried. "You don't know what you're doing! A lovely--lovely--young girl like you to give yourself to a man like Kaire with a reputation so notorious that----"

"I'm not too notorious--I notice--for you people--to beg libraries from," drawled Sheridan Kaire. Then quite suddenly he leaned back against the wainscoating of the cabin and began to laugh sardonically. "Jabber all you want to," he said. "It's a good way to pass the time! Just a minute more now and we'll be off, beating it for Key West or Galveston--or any other place where the parsons are thickest and quickest! Miss Daphne Bretton and Mr. Sheridan Kaire--heavily chaperoned by President Claudia Merriwayne! All the newspapers will lean heavily on that chaperone item! So square it any way you want to with your college, Miss Merriwayne!" he bowed. "Now that you [184] have squared it with Daphne!" More hilariously yet he yielded to his mirth, and called loudly for the Steward. "Champagne for everybody, to-night!" he ordered. "Guests, crew, cabin boys, everybody! If the cat won't drink it, drown him in it! Drat libraries!" he shouted lustily. "_This is_ my Bachelor Dinner!"

Swishing like a serpent's hiss, Miss Merriwayne started for her cabin. As she passed Daphne she drew her skirts aside with a gesture that would have been sufficiently insulting without any further action. But her tongue refused to be robbed of its own particular reprisal.

"As I have remarked once before," she murmured icily, "you--you little wanton!"

"_Not so fast_!" cried a new voice from the doorway. Towering, white head and brown shoulders over everybody, Jaffrey Bretton loomed on the scene.

"Oh--Hades!" sighed the master of the house-boat.

"_Not so fast, anybody_!" begged Jaffrey Bretton. If the smile on his face was just a little bit set it was at least still a smile. [185] Quite casually above the spurt and flare of his inevitable match and his inevitable cigarette his shrewd glance swept the gamut of startled faces. "_What's_ all the rumpus about?" he quizzed. Simple as the question was it seemed for some reason or other to put a queer sort of pucker into everybody's pulses.

("Oh, what a place!" shivered the oldest trustee. "Why did we ever come?") ("Oh, what a man!" quivered the architect. "I wish I had designed him!")

Ignoring all other pulses, Jaffrey Bretton turned to Miss Merriwayne. With sincere and unaffected interest he appraised the majestic if somewhat arrogant bloom of what had been only a mere bud of good looks and ambition twenty years before.

"You are certainly very handsome, Clytie," he affirmed.

"'Clytie?'" gasped the oldest trustee.

"C-Clytie?" stammered Daphne.

"Miss Merriwayne and I were boy and girl friends together," observed Bretton with unruffled blandness. "But for the moment it is not personal reminiscence that concerns me most." Towering, dominant, absolutely [186] relentless, but still serene, he blocked Miss Merriwayne's exit. "Just--what, Clytie," he asked, "were you calling my little girl?"

"You heard what I called her, Mr. Bretton!" said Miss Merriwayne. "I called her a wanton!"

Above the flare of a fresh match and a fresh cigarette Jaffrey Bretton restudied her face.

"And--do--you--find it convenient now to retract it?" he asked.

"I am not in the habit of retracting my statements," said Miss Merriwayne.

"S--o?" mused Jaffrey Bretton. As though by pure accident, his eyes strayed to the blue prints on the table. "What have we here?" he smiled, "building plans?"

Sardonically from his own particular silence Sheridan Kaire's laugh rang out.

"Those are the plans for the new library," he confided, "that your daughter and I are considering giving to her--to her Alma Mater!"

Humor for humor Jaffrey Bretton's laugh answered his. "Good stuff!" he said, "the one bright thought!" [187]

"And you?" he addressed one stranger, "are the--the possible architect?"

"I am," conceded the architect.

Very definitely Jaffrey Bretton drew back a little from the door and pointed to the passageway. "Trot along!" he smiled. "And you?" he asked the old gentleman.

"I am Miss Merriwayne's oldest trustee," asserted that dignitary with some unctuousness.

"Trot along!" smiled Jaffrey Bretton.

With punctilious courtesy he waved the Dean's lovely old mother after them. "For the moment," he begged her, "you will pardon my peremptoriness? The thing that remains to be said is said best to the least numbers."

"But I--I like--your little girl!" protested the frail but determinate aristocrat.

"So do I!" smiled Bretton, but nodded her out.

"Who are you?" demanded Bretton of the only man but Kaire who remained.

"I am John Burnarde!" said the man, quite invincibly.

"I thought so!" said Bretton.

"And as Miss Merriwayne's rather special [188] representative at this time," added John Burnarde, "I refuse to leave the room while she remains!"

"Oh, I like _you_!" said Bretton. "I've always rather liked you! But whether I did or not!" he crisped, "you've _got_ to stay! You and Miss Merriwayne, and Daphne, and myself!" With a toss of his white hair he flung a message to the master of the house-boat. "Sorry to bully your guests so, Kaire!" he said. "But not knowing the plan of your boat, and being too formal to rummage around very much," he added dryly, "this cabin seemed somehow the surest place for a rather private conversation. . . . Shall you still remain with us as our host?"

"I certainly shall!" snapped Kaire.

"You are perfectly welcome," smiled Jaffrey Bretton. "And you notice, perhaps--that the engine has not started?"

"I notice only too damned well," said Kaire, "that the engine has not started!"

Out of the shadowy curve of Sheridan Kaire's jealous arm Daphne sprang suddenly forward.

"Oh, Old-Dad!" she besought him, [189] "please--Please--don't make such a fuss! What's the good of it? What's the use? If I'm bad, I'm bad! And--unless I'm going crazy, too--what is there left but _fun_?"

"But you see you're all wrong," smiled her father. "You're not 'bad' at all! Without any question whatsoever you're the goodest person here!"

"Oh--Old-Dad!" scoffed Daphne.

"But I mean it," said her father. "The little fracas at college was only a mistake. Richard Wiltoner's mistake, indeed, rather than yours--except in so far as you dared him into the making of it. Oh, shucks!" shrugged her father. "Everybody makes mistakes!"

"Not mistakes like mine!" flared Daphne.

"Oh, yes, they do," smiled her father. "So, please, I beg of you don't go bad just on that account! Truly, you'd be surprised if you knew how many staid grown people of your acquaintance have made very similar mistakes. Now take Miss Merriwayne and myself, for instance. Twenty----"

With a gasp of horror Miss Merriwayne reached out and touched him on the arm. Her face was stark, but even now she did not [190] lose altogether the poise so long and laboriously acquired. "Some other time--some other day," she essayed desperately, "I will be very glad to--to discuss old days with you. But now--this moment--your remarks--your suggestions are--are ribald. Have you no--no honor?" she implored him.

"None--any--longer that conflicts with my daughter's honor," said Jaffrey Bretton. To the several pairs of startled eyes raised to his, Jaffrey Bretton gave no glance. Every conscious thought in his body was fixed at the moment on Daphne. "Come here, Honey," he said.

With embarrassment but no fear Daphne came to him.

"Let me pass!" ordered Miss Merriwayne.

"It is not convenient," said Jaffrey Bretton.

Across Daphne's tousled head, past Claudia Merriwayne's statuesque shoulder, he stared off retrospectively into space. "What I have to say," he confided, "will take only an instant . . . . Twenty years ago," he mused, "Miss Merriwayne and I were trapped in a situation quite astonishingly similar to Daphne's college tragedy. . . . Except that [191] in our case there were four thoughtless youngsters involved instead of two--and infinitely more kissing. . . . Let me see," he turned suddenly to Daphne. "In your case I believe there was no kissing?"

"I should think not!" raged Daphne.

"U-m-m-m," mused her father. "Well--there was certainly _some_ kissing in ours."

"This is outrageous!" cried Miss Merriwayne. "Let me pass!"

With a smile that would have been insolent if it had not been so brooding, Jaffrey Bretton spread his arms across the doorway.

"You are a bigger girl, Clytie, than you used to be," he said. "You can't slip out of this situation quite as easily as you slipped from the other."

With a shrug of his shoulders he turned and stared into space again. When he glanced back at his companions it was with just a little bit of a start.

"Oh, yes--I forgot," he said. "There was a door--that time, that wasn't blocked. And the other boy jumped through the window. . . . What possible haven was there left," he asked, "for the panic-stricken little [192] room-mate except in my arms? She smelt of violets, I remember," he mused, "and her throat was very white. Nobody ever knew about the presence of the other boy. And only the four of us knew about Cly--'Miss Merriwayne' I would say. But if Miss Merriwayne had come back," he quickened ever so slightly, "and acknowledged frankly that she, also, had been present, the school authorities, I suppose, would hardly have judged the unintentional tete-a-tete as harshly--as they did. . . . Even at the eleventh hour, if she had been willing to come back and acknowledge it or at the twelfth for the matter of that--or even at one o'clock or two, while the outraged Powers harangued on the case . . . . But by three o'clock, that timorous little room-mate, seeing no other exit, slashed a door through her little white throat and fled away.

"So you see, Daphne," he smiled, "that even across a mistake like _that_----"

"You mean," blanched Daphne, "that----"

Like a man straining very slightly toward more air the new Dean's throat muscles lifted. [193]

On Kaire's face alone the grin remained half a grin, anyway.

"Sailed away from a sinking wreck
With a--something--something--on her deck,"

he quoted diabolically.

"_Hush_!" warned Jaffrey Bretton.

"I had my own life to consider!" flared Claudia Merriwayne.

"You had your own life to consider," bowed Jaffrey Bretton.

"My people were very poor!" flared Claudia Merriwayne. "They had made great sacrifices to educate me! Already, even then, my chances of future academic distinction were the sole topics in my home!"

"Already," acquiesced Jaffrey Bretton, "your chances of future academic distinction were the sole topics in your home! . . .

"So you see, Daphne," he turned and readdressed his little girl suddenly, "so you see that, even across a mistake like _that_, people may yet achieve real honors and much usefulness!"

Like a man a little bit weary, his arms [194] dropped down to his sides again, but his figure still blocked the doorway.

"That is all, Clytie," he bowed. "And you may rest assured, of course, that neither Daphne nor Mr. Kaire nor I will ever repeat the little anecdote which I have just quoted--unless Daphne herself shall contend that Richard Wiltoner should know. . . . Mr. Burnarde, of course, needs no guarantees, having already proved with fearless courtesy that your interests are his."

With frank cordiality he swung about and held out his hand to Burnarde.

"The best of luck to you, Burnarde! in all things!" he smiled. "If Fate had ordained you to marry my little girl, you certainly would have made a fine Friend-in-Law for me as well as an honorable lord and master for Daphne! . . . And after the first haste of the honeymoon was over what good times we would have had together--you and I! Winter nights and an open fire!--our books--our pipes--a plate of apples--a jug of cider--and the Classics! With Daphne sitting low--somewhere on a little stool--just a little bit off, somehow, on the edge of it all? Very [195] beautiful? Very miraculous? Very soul-satisfying to the eye--service of your senses? Darning your stockings, perhaps? Or freshening up your second-best dress suit? With her little bright head cocked ever so slightly to one side, listening, yearning, starving for the 'Pipe of Pan' which neither you nor I, Burnarde, will ever hear again nor recognize, probably, if we did. . . . You chaps, Burnarde, whose hearts grow in the shape of Books--you chaps who mix the best ink-knowledge of the world with your own good blood--you love very purely, very ideally. No man could fail to trust you. But, Youth, Burnarde, brooks no rivals, either of work or play. And in the decision between two women--which more men have to make than any woman, thank God, ever guesses--you have chosen, I think--very wisely!"

Crackling with starch Miss Merriwayne swung sharply around.

"I consider it exceedingly impertinent," she affirmed, "for you to link my name with Doctor Burnarde's in any way at just this time! There is not the slightest excuse for it, not the slightest justification." [196]

"It was Doctor Burnarde's--mother that I referred to," smiled Bretton, and bowed both the Dean and the President from the room.

If the little gasp that slipped from his lips expressed relaxation as did Daphne's sharp sigh, or Kaire's somewhat breathy grin, such relaxation was at least quite mutually curtailed. Without any hesitancy whatsoever the cabin door closed very definitely behind Miss Merriwayne, and from the clicking lock Jaffrey Bretton extracted the key and threw it down on the mahogany table.

"Now for--_you_, Sheridan Kaire!" he said.

"I am all here," grinned Kaire. "Also--incidentally, there are other keys to the cabin door."

"Why, of course there are other keys to the cabin door," conceded Bretton with perfect good humor. From his own pocket as he spoke he drew forth a bunch of keys, freed them from their controlling ring, and tossed them in confused and confusing muddle after the cabin key. "Any of us can get out of this cabin in two minutes," he confided. "But it is not my intention that anybody should bolt from it in much less time than that. [197] Many a man has cooled his original purposes in the time that it takes to fit an unfamiliar key to a perfectly familiar lock. Also, while we are rating incidental things, it does not seem best to me that, with Lost Man and Alliman waiting in the launch, we should run any risk of being rushed from outside. If one of us should sneeze, for instance--or raise his voice in any special emphasis?--Alliman is so deplorably impulsive with his shot-gun."

"I get you!" said Kaire. "There is not to be any fuss."

"You get me perfectly," bowed Bretton. "Now for the--the discussion." Quite casually he walked over to the mahogany table, sat down, took a single interested glance at the blue prints and swept them all aside. "Let's all be seated," he said.

Very reluctantly Daphne came forward into the light and slid down into the chair opposite him.

"I--I look so funny," she deplored.

"You certainly do," said her father. "Yet I would be willing to wager," he smiled quite unexpectedly, "that of all the variant ladies who have been entertained in this room there [198] has never been a lovelier one or--one more tempting."

"_Sir_?" bridled Kaire. With the dark flush rising once again to his cheek-bones he sprang forward to the table and perched himself on the edge of it with a sinister sort of nonchalance. "_Sir_?" he repeated threateningly.

"Oh, don't concern yourself for a moment with my daughter's tender sensibilities," begged Bretton. "Their conservation--you must understand--is still in my hands."

Somberly for a moment each man concerned himself with the lighting of a fresh cigarette.

Then Bretton jerked back his chair.

"Just what was your plan, Kaire?" he asked.

"I had planned," said Kaire, without an instant's hesitation, "to take Daphne to the first port we could make and marry her any old way she wanted to be married."

"Why?" asked Bretton.

"_Why_?" snarled Kaire. "_Why_? Well, what an extraordinary question! Why does any man marry any woman?"

"For so many different reasons," said [199] Bretton, "that it rather specially interested me to hear just what yours were."

"Why, I'm crazy about her!" flushed Kaire. "Utterly mad! Never saw anything in my life that I wanted so much!"

"Well--_you can't have her_!" said Bretton.

"By the Lord!--I _will_ have her!" cried Kaire. "Why--why shouldn't I have her?" he demanded. "Fate fairly threw her into my arms just now, didn't it? I didn't know you people were here! I didn't know where in thunder you people were!--or how I was going to find you with your blooming old dog! Sitting on the beach I was, all in the dark--and--and the girl comes crawling right into my arms! 'Most shot her, I did!--thought she was some kind of a varmint! Thought----"

"Daphne----" said her father.

With an impetuous gesture Kaire flung the interruption aside.

"She'd have run away with someone!" he cried. "Not to-night, of course! But soon! Next week! Next month! She was all primed for it! And you can't stop 'em when they once get started!--not the high-spirited [200] ones!--not when they're hurt and mad, too! And she might have done a heap sight worse than run away with me! I'm going to worship her! I'm going to give her everything she wants! I'm going to take her every place she wants to go! Why, six months from now she won't even remember that she went to the damned old college! Six months from now she'll think that being expelled from college was something she read in a comic paper! And I'm--going--to take--her," he said, with a suddenly lowered and curiously sinister positiveness, "whether you like it or not!--because she has given me her word!"

"Is that true, Daphne?" asked her father.

Like a little white whirlwind Daphne jumped to her feet.

"Why, of course it's true, Old-Dad!" she stormed. "Live or die, sink or swim, I have given Mr. Kaire my solemnest word that I will marry him!"

"An absolutely--unconditional word?" probed Bretton.

"On one condition only!" triumphed Daphne. [201]

"And that condition----" drawled her father.

"Is a matter of confidence between your daughter and me," interposed Kaire hastily.

"I respect the confidence," said Bretton. "But only a fool could fail to make half a guess of what that condition was. . . . You are keeping unconscionably sober."

"What I keep is my own business!" snapped Kaire.

"Per--haps," conceded Bretton. Quite casually, as one whom neither Time nor Circumstance particularly crowded, he picked up an ivory paper cutter from the table and studied it with some intentness before he spoke again.

"Just what--were you doing on Martha's Island to-night, Kaire?" he asked.

"What were you doing yourself?" quizzed Kaire.

"Do you trade your answer for mine?" smiled Bretton.

"Certainly!" said Kaire.

"I was there because Martha sent for me," said Bretton. "I thought she was in some sort of trouble. I had no idea it was about you [202] and the dog. . . . You were a brick about the dog, Kaire!" he brightened abruptly. "And I sha'n't soon forget it! _But you can't have my daughter!_"

Unflinching eye for unflinching eye, Sheridan Kaire answered the challenge.

"I most always look Martha up when I'm down this way," he confided informationally. "I knew Martha in Paris twelve years ago."

"And loved Martha in Paris twelve years ago?" murmured Bretton.

"Everybody loved Martha in Paris twelve years ago, you know!" shrugged Kaire.

"No, I didn't know," said Bretton. "I was in New Zealand about that time. It was at an insane asylum in Chicago that I first saw Martha."

"At an insane asylum?" frowned Kaire. "I knew she'd gone queer, but I never knew it was as queer as that."

"It was quite as queer as that," said Bretton, a bit dryly. "Right in the midst of one of her best vaudeville acts, it seems, she went into hysterics because a man in the front row had on a red tie--and on the way home to her hotel she fainted in her carriage at a scarlet [203] hat in some brilliantly lighted shop window. So they shut her up. And a medical friend of mine was quite a bit interested in the case. Most extraordinarily simple his explanation was. No Indian massacres involved, no hidden Bluebeard Chambers. Something as trivial, perhaps, as a kitten's cut foot bleeding across a child's first white dress--a nervous injury so trivial that no one had stopped to investigate it. . . . But thirty years afterward, when Life got ready to smash her, it went back thirty years and smashed her there! Seems sort of too bad though," mused Bretton, "to have to be shut up just because you can't digest red. Some people, you know, can't digest oysters. And at least two friends of mine experience an almost complete mental stoppage at the very mention of Suffrage. Yet _they_ are still at large! . . . So we got Martha out of the asylum," he quickened, "and reinvested her life and her fortunes in an all-green jungle, where, except for a curious impression that I am her benefactor, and the unspoken but doubtless persistent apprehension that she may even yet sight the crimson of a gay yacht-cushion or [204] the flare of a tourist's sweater and revert to chaos again, she seems to me perfectly normal." With a little grim smack of his lips he seemed to bite off the end of his narrative. "And that, Sheridan Kaire," he snapped, "is the full and complete account of my acquaintance with Martha. . . . But yours----" he attested very slowly, very distinctly, "was not the full and complete account of yours!"

With his voice as quiet as a knife Kaire swung round from his table corner.

"Since when, Mr. Bretton," he asked, "has it been considered healthy for one man to call another a liar?"

"Whatever worry you have about the healthiness of anything," smiled Bretton, "should concern yourself, I think--rather than me. . . . No one will ever shut _me_ up," he smiled, "because, like poor Martha, I also am just a little bit color-mad! 'Seeing red' though isn't what bothers me, you understand?--it's seeing _yellow_!"

"You think I have a yellow streak?" flushed Kaire.

"Most of us have," smiled Bretton. "But [205] yours--at the moment--looks to me unduly broad!"

"Why, Old-Dad!" flamed Daphne. "How can you speak so to--to the man I'm going to marry?

"But you see--you're not going to marry him!" smiled her father.

"I tell you I am!" flamed Daphne. "I have given my word!"

"And she'll keep it, too!" triumphed Kaire. "High-strung kids always do, somehow! Whatever else they smash--china, hearts, laws--they never seem to break their words!--not before they're twenty, anyway!" he grinned with sudden diablerie. "And Daphne is only eighteen!"

"Hanged if you're not rather an amusing cuss!" admitted Bretton. Very coolly he narrowed his eyes to the insolent young face before him. "I--I recognize your charm! Two parts devil to one part imp--and all the rest of it. The mysterious fascination of your scar with every emotion you feel in the World traveling up and down its white track--in an open car! Truly, I'm sincerely sorry about your health!" [206]

"Oh, quit twitting about my lungs!" snarled Kaire.

"Lungs?" questioned Bretton with faintly raised eyebrows. "Lungs? Oh, dear me--there are several other things about your looks--besides lungs--that I don't like!" Mercilessly, but not maliciously, he jumped up and crossed to a spot directly confronting Kaire. "With your waggish humor," he said, "and your inherently sportsmanlike instincts, you might have made a pretty good lad if you'd only started earlier." Piercingly his eyes probed into Kaire's. "But my little girl," he said, "isn't--going--to pay--because you didn't start earlier!"

With an oath Kaire sprang to his feet.

"I'm not the only man in the world who's been wild!" he cried. "And you know it--if anybody does!"

"You're the only man I think of at the moment," said Bretton, "who isn't pretty sorry about it when it comes to offering his stale hand to the first real woman of his life."

"Is--that--so?" sneered Kaire.

"It's--so," said Bretton very quietly. With a single glance at Daphne he turned to Kaire [207] again, struck another match, lit another cigarette. "Love isn't an overcoat, you know, Kaire," he said. "It's underclothes! The White Linen of Life! And there seems to be something--peculiarly and particularly offensive to a fastidious body--in being proffered personal linen which still retains even the scent--let alone the sweat of a previous relation . . . . The Almighty, our Mothers, and our Ministers, may forgive us our slovenly dinginess or our careless laundrying, being all of them more or less Museum Collectors and interested inherently in our historical values or the original fineness of our weave-or the ultimate endurance of our warp and woof. But the Almighty--and our Mothers--and our Ministers--don't have to _wear_ us, Kaire! Not next to their skins! Don't have to sleep with us--wake with us--live with us--die with us!" The hand that held the cigarette trembled very slightly, the eyes that glanced back again at Daphne were dark and poignant with pain. "You are perfectly right, Kaire! No man knows better than I the mess that a chap may make of his life--nor how poor the fabric that I, personally--in [208] the common experience of men--will have to offer the woman I love . . . . very worn it will be, very frayed!--but at least it has been cleansed in the bitter tears of regret!"

"Is that--so?" sneered Kaire.

"It is--so," persisted Bretton. "And God knows that neither Piety nor Wit nor anything in the world but sheer Good Luck pulled me ashore in time. But, like other half-drowned men, I suppose, I had neither wit nor time to choose my landing. Rocks, sands, valleys, mountains, all looked like miracles to me. So, mistaking austerity for purity, and severity for integrity, I married a woman to whom the slightest caress was a liberty, and marriage itself a sacrilege. In being sorry for myself I have not altogether, I trust, failed to be sorry for her. We are made as we are made. But it is only natural I suppose--that I should like my daughter to be a Good Lover. I believe in Good Lovers. But no one can make a good lover who is mated to a poor one!"

"I'll risk the kind of Lover I am!" cried Kaire.

"_I won't_! affirmed Bretton. [209]

"There are also some things that I won't do!" grinned Kaire. "I won't release your daughter from her promise!"

"She doesn't love you, you know?" warned Bretton. "Even granting perfectly frankly that you have excited her wonderment, 'wonderment' isn't love. We're all of us put together on a more or less hasty plan, I suppose, but just because some forgotten basting thread gives us an odd tweak now and then doesn't mean, you know, that the actual seams of our existence are ripping any."

"I don't care what anything means," said Kaire, "as long as Daphne has given me her promise to marry me."

"But the promise is so hysterical," argued Bretton. "The sublime adolescent idiocy of the Boy on the Burning Deck, with fame for one generation and caricature for eternity."

"I'm not interested in eternity," said Kaire.

"What are you interested in?" asked Bretton.

"In--myself!" said Kaire.

Very soberly for a moment Bretton frowned off into space.

"Kaire," he resumed at last rather quickly, [210] "you are making a brutal mistake. Listen! There is a lad up North who was made for Daphne!--a fine lad!--a clean lad! With young energies to match her young energies! And young mysteries to mate her young mysteries! And young problems to steady her young problems! Across the mutual innocence of their little disaster it is absolutely inevitable that each should have received a peculiarly poignant sex-image of the other. Except for you--except for _this_--who knows but what----"

"There will be time enough for that when I am through," said Kaire. "Six months--ten--a year at the most."

"When you are through?" said Bretton very quietly. "The tender soul of a young girl who marries a man like you--is not over-apt to survive the experience."

Defiantly and unscrupulously Kaire delivered his ultimatum.

"It is not my responsibility," he said, "where any train goes after I get off!"

"That is your last word?" asked Bretton.

"It is my last word," grinned Kaire.

"And yours, Daphne?" quizzed her father. [211]

"I will not break my word!" persisted Daphne. "I will not! I will not!" Her cheeks were raging red as though with fever, her eyes oddly aglint. "I will not! I will not!" she repeated.

"All right then, Kaire," said Jaffrey Bretton. "I'm going to smash you!"