Chapter V: Part II: 106 (3)

"Oh, no, you won't!" laughed Kaire. "That's the limitation of good men like you! You'll think you're going to smash me!--you'll have every intention indeed of smashing me!--push me way to the edge!--but never quite over! Something won't let you! Honor, I believe you call it."

"I--am--going--to push you--over the edge," said Bretton. "I am going to send for Martha."

"Martha?" cried Kaire. His face was suddenly ashy gray. Then abruptly his laugh rang out again.

"There hasn't been power in heaven or earth for ten years," he scoffed, "that could bring Martha out of her green jungle when even so much as the smoke of a yacht showed on her horizon! Even if she could slip by [212] her attendant!" he scoffed, "or her Chinese cook!--or----"

"Martha is in the passageway--just outside," pointed Bretton. "About three feet, I should think, from where you are standing!"

"_What_?" staggered Kaire.

"And I am going to push Martha to the edge and over," said Bretton very quietly. "And you to the edge and over--and jump in after you with every wallowing truth I know--if by so doing, the little girl I begot in bewilderment and ignored in indifference--but have found at last in love and understanding remains on the safe side!"

With eyes half crazed Daphne stood staring from her father's grim face to Sheridan Kaire's blanching features.

"Do you mean----" she gasped, "that there is another woman? Someone who has a--a claim? Someone who----"

"We will let Martha tell her own story," said Jaffrey Bretton. Very softly he stepped to the table and began to rummage among the loose keys. "I have tried not to act impulsively," he said. With unmistakable significance he glanced back at Kaire. "It will [213] take me at least a minute, Kaire," he said, "to fit a key to this door. . . . As I have remarked once before--many men have found time to change their minds in a minute."

"I have better things to do in a minute than change my mind!" boasted Kaire. As stealthily as a cat he slipped round the table to Daphne and took her in his arms while Jaffrey Bretton tinkered with the lock.

"Oh, my little beautiful!" he implored her. "My white--white darling! My lily girl! The only sweet--the only decent love I've ever known! You won't fail me now, will you? I have not failed _you_! I never claimed," he besought her, "that there had never been any other women! Surely you're not going to hold any silly Past against me? You, my good angel! My----" Unconsciously his excited voice slipped from its whisper. "From to-day on!" he vowed. "From----"

"From what time to-day on?" asked Bretton a bit dryly.

Vaguely through the opening door loomed the white figure of a woman with her elbow crooked across her eyes. Except that the [214] lamp in the cabin was not unduly bright she might have been any normal person shielding her dark-attuned optic nerves from some unexpected glare. Yet the tropical pallor that gleamed both above and below the crooked elbow was oddly suggestive of floridness, and the faded muslin gown of a skirt-and-sleeve fashion ten years outlawed, molded her sumptuous figure with all the sleek sensuousness of satin.

"Martha," said Jaffrey Bretton very gently, "this cabin is hung with crimson, cushioned with crimson, carpeted with crimson! Will you still come if I ask you to?"

"It ees as I have said, Mr. Bret-ton," answered the faintly foreign voice.

Then Kaire with a cry sprang forward and slammed the door in the woman's wincing face.

"Stop! Stop, Bretton!" he begged. "Just a minute! Just a minute!--give me one tiny little more minute to think!" His forehead was beaded with sweat his hands shaking like aspens.

"I have one more minute I will be very glad to give you," said Bretton. [215]

Like a person distracted, Kaire stood staring all around him. Half askance from over his shoulder his glanced flashed back at Daphne, wavered an instant, and settled again on her face with a curious sort of gasp.

"Do--do you _still_ hold to your word?" he stammered.

Fevered, frightened, strangling back her sobs as best she could, Daphne lifted her strained but indomitable little face to his.

"I--will--not break my word!" she smiled.

On Sheridan Kaire's incongruous, dissolute face, a smile as tortured-sweet as hers quickened for a single unbelievable instant and was gone again. As one puzzled only, he turned back to Bretton, and stood staring almost vacantly into the older man's impatient eyes. Then quite abruptly he turned and started toward the door.

"I--I feel a little faint," he said. "A little queer. . . . I will be back in a moment!"

With a sharp bang the door shut behind him. In the passage outside they heard a single rough word, a woman's imperious protest, the soft thud of feet on a thick carpet, and a cabin boy's shrill call. [216]

On the carved mahogany shelf in the cabin the clock went on about its business--one minute--three--five--ten. Through the open portholes a faint breeze sucked at the crimson silk curtains, and ripple to creak, and creak to ripple, the houseboat yearned to the tide and the tide to the houseboat.

Daphne's eyes never left the clock. Weirdly exultant, excitantly heroic, she kept the ill-favored tryst.

Blurred in the smoke of his cigarette, Jaffrey Bretton's vivid white head merged like a half-erased drawing into the big shimmering mirror behind him. It was just as well, perhaps, that the twist of his mouth was hidden from Daphne's eyes.

There was no sound of voices in the outer passageway to herald Sheridan Kaire's return: just a little stumble on the edge of a rug--an unwonted fumble with the door handle. It wasn't defiance that backed him up now against the support of the wainscoating, but a very faint uncertainty in his legs. There was nothing uncertain, however, about his face. Geniality, not to say, jocularity, [217] wreathed it from ear to ear and from brow to chin.

"Sorry to have kept you waiting so long, dear--dear people," he beamed. "But a Host has so many responsibilities . . . . Overseeing the pantries and the--the libraries and the ladies!" he beamed. "Why--why, I can't help my way with the ladies!" he turned and explained with half-mocking anxiety to Jaffrey Bretton's absolutely inscrutable face. "Always, ever since I was a little boy," he deprecated, "I've been the Village cut-up! So was my father before me, and his father before--before me. Too bad, isn't it?" he questioned sharply. "Such a nice family! And so lively!" At an unexpected glimpse of his face in the mirror he turned back to meet Daphne's staring face. "Now this scar of mine, darling--darling," he confided dramatically, "you want to know where I got it? All the ladies always want to know where I got it! Just as soon as a lady gets up her courage to ask me about it," he chuckled, "then I always know she's really beginning to think of me! You asked if I got it in a 'brave war,'" he chuckled. "Sure I got it in [218] a brave war. Only the brave deserve--affairs," he parodied lightly. "It was in Smyrna," he confided, "when I was eighteen. I--I made a little poem about it:

"'There was a young Princess of Smyrna,
Of love I endeavored to learn her,
But her father in hate cleft a seam through my pate,
Now wasn't that the deuce of a turn-a?'"

Precipitately and without the slightest warning he plunged down into a chair and began to whimper maudlinly while with one uncertain finger tip he traced and retraced the twitching, zig-zagged scar. "It--it isn't nice, is it?" he babbled idiotically. "And I was such a pretty boy? . . . Ladies shouldn't ask such questions," he babbled. "Not just as you're going to kiss 'em. It--it makes dead faces floating between! It--isn't nice! Oh, Daphne darling--darling----"

But with a little scream of release Daphne's hand was already on the door knob.

"Oh, come quick, Old-Dad!" she cried. "It's _all over_! It's all canceled! He's broken _his_ promise! He's----" [219]

In a single bound her father was at her side.

"Oh, I hope I haven't said anything that I shouldn't have!" babbled Kaire. With a desperate effort he struggled to his feet and raised his arms after the manner of one who is just about to lead a cheer. "Now, all together, ladies and gentlemen!" he cried.

"There was a young lady from Smyrna,
Of--of Smyrna----"

Across his flaccid mouth the odd little smile tightened suddenly in a single poignant flash of bewilderment and pain. "Oh, you Little Good Works Business!" he grinned. "You--you----"

Then, before their startled eyes, he pitched over headlong on the table, gave a queer twitch of his shoulders, and lay very quiet, with a little flush of blood spreading redder and redder from his lips.

But before Jaffrey Bretton could snatch Daphne from the sight, her overtaxed brain had collapsed into delirium. Dodging down the narrow passageway with the dreadful [220] little burden in his arms he stumbled almost immediately on Martha's crouching figure.

"Martha!" he cried. "There's something redder than curtains in the cabin back there! Run and get Kaire's man!"

"Kaire's _man_?" scoffed the woman shrilly. Robbed in that single instant of all her inhibition she turned and sped madly for the reddest thing that she would ever know, every thought in her awakened brain, every flash of her jeweled hands keyed suddenly to service.

Close behind her a cabin boy came hurrying. Champagne and crystal glasses were on his tray.

Roused from a half-completed nap Kaire's man came running to the scene.

Like an old hound scenting disaster Lost Man himself loomed unexpectedly in the doorway. With his great tunic-swathed height, his sharply dilating nostrils, he seemed bristling suddenly with some strange new sort of authority. For a single instant his beetling brows glowered to the stark, startled faces around him. Then out of--God knows what stained-glass memories--out of God knows [221] what chanceled associations he burst forth resonantly into the opening lines of the Episcopal burial service.

"'I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth----'"

With a gasp from his own frazzled nerves Jaffrey Bretton pushed mercilessly past him.

"Oh, cut it out, Lost Man," he cried. "This isn't death--yet! Kaire's man knows just what to do, and has got a chance to do it--probably--even one or more times yet! Go get the launch ready, you and Alliman! If there's nothing here we can do, we'll go _quick_!"

"Where?" stared Lost Man.

"Back to our own island, you idiot!" snapped Bretton. "And pack up everything we've got! And catch that coast steamer in the morning! We're going North," he paled, "as fast as we can get there! I want a brain specialist for my little girl!" Stumbling along after Lost Man with his babbling burden in his arms, he stepped down into the waiting launch. [222]

Already with his gnarled calloused hands Alliman the outlaw was wringing strange cries from the reluctant engine. Up from a somber shadow in the bow the brown khaki lady lifted a startled but unquestioning face.

"Let me hold her!" insisted Lost Man. "I know how to hold 'em--the little lambs!" Like some vaguely parodied picture of "The Good Shepherd" the old man gathered the little limp figure into his arms, and retreated to the stern of the boat.

Half resentful, half relieved, Bretton hesitated an instant and then merged himself into the shadowy bow.

With a grunt of triumph Alliman started the launch gulfward. With creaks and groans and puffy sighs the old engine rallied to the task. Except for the chop of waves against the bow, the trickle of tides at the stern, no other sound broke the black silence except Lost Man's crooning monotone.

"There--there--there--there--there," crooned Lost Man. "There--there--there--there--there!" When he wasn't saying "There--there--there," he seemed to be trying to sing. Very laboriously, very [223] painstakingly, word by word and note by note he was straining very evidently to dig up something from his memory.

"Bring to--little children (he struggled)
Visions--sweet--of Thee,
Guard the sailors tossing (he quavered)
On the--the deep blue sea."

Along the whole dark shadowy length of the launch, the Outlaw's face alone shone wanly bright and reasonably clear-featured in the flare from the engine. Bloodless as the salt-pork that he fed on, dank-haired as the swamps and glades that encompassed him, brooding on Heaven knows what Past or what Future--a single convulsive tremor passed his pipe-clenched lips.

"Say, Boss," he said, "on them home runs of Baker's, was they straight-away hits? Or did they go over some fence?" [224]

III

IT WAS the Northern March--very cold, very snowy, very blustery, when Daphne woke from her last bad dream.

Brisk, bleak, absolutely literal, the frosted roofs and gables of a pleasant suburban landscape gleamed sociably at her through every casement window.

No squawking pelicans screeched like steam-whistles into her splitting eardrums. No interminable flights of sea gulls dragged their sharp-feathered wingpoints across her naked eyeballs. On the slime and stench of a dead shark's body her little foot had forever stopped slipping.

"Why--why, how--perfectly extraordinary!" woke Daphne.

It seemed to be a pretty room. A little too neat, perhaps, a little too impersonal, to be one's very own. But by no means as plushily impersonal as a hotel, and by no means as poison-neat as a hospital. [225]

"Wherever--in--the world--am I?" puzzled Daphne.

Very cautiously, very experimentally, she began to investigate her most immediate surroundings.

"I am at least in a very pretty--pale blue--wadded silk wrapper," she discovered with eminent satisfaction. "Also, on an astonishingly comfortable couch with at least a hundred pillows. . . . Oh--I hope the bow on my pigtail matches my pale blue wrapper!" she quickened expectantly. But there was no pigtail. Shockingly to her uplifted hands her short-cropped head loomed round and crisp and fluffy as a great worsted ball. "Oh, dear--oh, dear--oh, dear!" she gasped. "If I am dead and born again--I am a boy!" Wilting down discouragedly into her "hundred pillows" one slender hand dropped weakly to the floor. "Life is very empty," she said. "Everything in life is very empty--everything." Along her sluggish spine a curious little thrill passed suddenly. "There is a nose in my hand!" she gasped. "A _lovin'_ nose! Creep-Mouse!" she cried out [226] desperately. "Is it--possible that it's your lovin' nose?"

"Perfectly possible!" thudded Creep-Mouse's essentially practical tail. "Perfectly possible," swished and fawned the bashful little fur body.

"This is certainly very extraordinary," struggled Daphne. "Instead of being anything that I thought it was, it is quite evidently some sort of a bewitchment. I am a boy! But Creep-Mouse is still Creep-Mouse! I who went to sleep _real_ have waked up in a Fairy Story! But _what_ Fairy Story?" she shivered. "And _what_ page?"

Quite inadvertently her eyes strayed to the little white table at the head of her couch. In the middle of the table shone a silver bell.

"It would be interesting," mused Daphne, "to ring that bell and see who comes! If it's the 'Hunch-Backed Pony'--then I'll know, of course, that I'm in the Russian Fairy book. And if it's Snow White--" very cautiously she struggled up from her pillows and reached for the silver bell. "But I must ring you very--little-y," she faltered in her weakness. "So that whatever comes will surely [227] be very little." Then with an impetuous wilfulness that surprised even herself she grabbed up the bell with both hands and rang it and rang it and _rang_ it!

In the corridor somewhere a door slammed and footsteps came running--running! Her doorhandle turned! A portiere wrenched aside!

"It's the seven bears story--_life size_!" she screamed. And opened her eyes to Richard Wiltoner. Like a silver bomb the bell whizzed by his head. "Get out of my room!" she screamed. "Get out of my room before I'm expelled again!"

"Silly!" laughed Richard Wiltoner. "I'm visiting in your house! They told me to answer your bell!"

"My house?" collapsed Daphne. "Don't blame this house on me! I don't even know where I am!"

"Why, you're in your own home!" laughed Richard Wiltoner. "Just wait a minute and I'll call your people. . . . Everybody rushed outdoors to help a horse that fell on the ice."

"Fell on the ice? How nice," mused Daphne. "Why--why, I can rhyme again!" [228] she exulted suddenly with softly clapping hands. "Why, I'd forgotten all about it!" Then a little bit bewilderedly the white brow clouded. "Richard," she asked, "you--you said 'everybody' rushed out. What do you mean--'everybody'?"

"Why, your father, Mr. Bretton," said Richard, "and Mrs. Bretton."

"'Mrs. Bretton?'" jumped Daphne. Very limply she sank back into her pillows again. "Oh, I knew it," she said. "I've waked in the wrong story!" Quite severely she seemed to hold Richard responsible for the mistake. "Oh--no, Richard," she corrected him. "In the story I belong in there's no Mrs. Bretton. Just Mr. Bretton!--Mr. Jaffrey Bretton!--a tall man," she endeavored to illustrate, "with snow-white hair!"

"The very lad," laughed Richard, "and Mrs. Bretton. She's a brick! She's got red hair. Oh, I didn't mean to be funny!" he apologized hastily.

"Funny?" flamed Daphne. Flushing, paling, flushing again--a dozen conflicting emotions seemed surging through her brain. [229] "Richard?" she questioned. "Have you ever lost anything?"

"I've lost both my parents," said Richard, "and three sisters--and I don't remember any of them."

"Haven't you anything left?" asked Daphne.

"I've got one brother," said Richard. "The crippled brother, you know? And my horse, Brainstorm."

"Do you love them?" questioned Daphne.

"I love Brainstorm," said Richard.

"I've had trouble, too," sighed Daphne. "I've lost my father and my hair."

"Someone seems to have found your father," laughed Richard in spite of himself. "But whatever in the world have you done with your hair?"

"That's just it, Richard," said Daphne. "Will you look in the top bureau drawer?"

Flushing forty colors Richard opened the top bureau drawer. He was handsome enough when he wasn't embarrassed. But under embarrassment he glowed like stained glass with a light behind it. "There are [230] ribbons here," he pawed. "And--and things! But no hair!"

"Oh, isn't it--awful?" shivered Daphne. "Well, is there a hair brush? I would so like to look all right when my--my stepmother comes."

"Just as though she hadn't seen you looking all kinds of wrong for weeks and weeks!" scoffed Richard. But very obediently he brought the hair brush.

"Just where do you think you'd better begin?" worried Daphne.

"I?" stammered Richard. "I?" With a wild little lunge he commenced the attack.

"My! But you're bumpy!" winced Daphne. "Don't you think that maybe it would be better to use the bristly side of the brush?"

"Oh, I say!" apologized Richard, "I _am_ rattled!" With reconstructed acumen he resumed the task.

"Oh, _that's_ nice," purred Daphne. "In a book I was reading there was the funniest thing--the husband in it was always brushing his wife's hair."

"How funny!" acquiesced Richard.

"Oh--awfully funny," purred Daphne. "I [231] guess there's a good deal more to this marriage-business," she observed sagely, "than some of us had supposed."

"Very likely," admitted Richard.

"Less nonsense, I mean," reflected Daphne. "But more hair-brushing--and putting away winter clothes, and----"

"Oh, I wish I had a wife," hooted Richard, "to put away my winter clothes!"

"I wish you had!" laughed Daphne. For the first time her mind went back to her little college tragedy with purely historical interest instead of pain. "Oh, I wish you had! That dress suit you bumped my nose against smelled so strong of camphor--I couldn't get it out of my nostrils all winter! Why, we're both laughing!" she exclaimed with sudden astonishment.

"Why shouldn't we?" argued Richard Wiltoner. In the midst of the reflection a most curious expression flashed across his eyes.

"_Wouldn't_ it have been funny," he said, "if you _had_ married me--that time I asked you?"

"We'd have fought like cats and dogs, I suppose," said Daphne. [232]

"But at least," laughed Richard, "you would have been putting away my winter clothes--just about now."

"And you--" retaliated Daphne.

"I'm already--brushing your hair!" laughed the boy.

"Let's never marry anybody," suggested Daphne. "Not for years!"

"I can't!" said Richard. "Not for years and years and years!--not to make a girl comfortable, I mean! There won't be any money. . . . There's my brother, you know; and I've got so many animals. . . . It's queer about animals," he stammered, "you--you can't fail the old ones when they're old, and you can't fail the young ones when they're young. It's like any other kind of family, I suppose," he smiled. "All fun and all responsibility! But never any time! And never any money!" Quite furiously he resumed the hair-brushing. "Oh, after all," he remarked, "_this_ isn't so awfully different from getting the snarls out of Brainstorm's mane. Only Brainstorm's mane is brown. And yours?" With a cry of sheer joy he stood off and surveyed his handiwork. "And yours--" he laughed, [233] "looks like a bunch of short-stemmed jonquils!"

"Oh, how--awful!" cried Daphne.

"No, it's cunning," flushed Richard.

A little bit teased by the laugh, Daphne met her own embarrassment with a fresh command.

"Oh, please--run quick now," she begged, "and tell my people as you call them--that a Lady-Who-Has-Been-Long-Away--sends her love and is home again!"

"You're too slow with your invitation," called her father's voice from the doorway. "We've already arrived!" With a most curious merge of excitement and serenity Jaffrey Bretton and the Intruding Lady walked into the room.

"How do you do?" said Daphne, with the faintest possible tinge of formality.

"Why, very well indeed," said her father, a bit casually. "How's yourself?" His more immediate attention at the moment seemed fixed on Richard and the waving hair brush.

"Oh, I'm all right," drawled Daphne very evenly. Then, with all the sudden tempestuous intensity of a child, she threw her arms [234] in the air. "Only, I don't see--even yet," she cried, "just what Richard Wiltoner is doing here."

With a quite unexplainable laugh her father dropped down on the edge of her couch.

"Why it's--it's about potatoes!" he laughed. "Richard is getting to be some farmer! He's written a magazine article about some new potato scheme of his. It's very interesting! I like experiments! I'm going to finance it. Not much, you know, but just a little. Just enough to take the strain off--and leave the push on. We'll go over in the spring when it's planting time," he began to laugh all over again, "and see that the experiment is started properly."

Quite severely Daphne drew back into her pillows. "I don't think it's very nice of you, Old-Dad," she said, "to laugh so at Richard's farming. Farming is a very--very noble profession, I think."

"It certainly is," conceded her father.

"And have you rabbits, Richard, as well as potatoes?" she questioned with unbroken [235] gravity. "And will there be jonquils? And new pigs?"

"There's liable to be 'most everything by that time," admitted Richard.

"Oh, all right then," brightened Daphne. "I think I'll come, too! I've thought a good deal about potatoes, myself!" With a little sigh, half fatigue, half contentment, she glanced up at her father just in time to intercept the glance of "white magic" that passed between him and the Intruding Lady. In an instant her little spine stiffened again. "Only--Richard," she smiled up bravely, "we unmarried people must surely stand by each other! Even after you go away maybe you'll write me about the rabbits and things? It's just a little bit lonely sometimes," quivered the smile, "to be the only unmarried person in the house."

With a perceptible quiver of her own smile the Intruding Lady came forward and dropped down on the couch just in front of Old-Dad.

"Oh, Little Girl," she said, "don't you think you're ever--ever going to like me any?" [236]

"Why, I like you now," whispered Daphne.

"And I'd like to like you--lots--only----" A bit worriedly the fluffy head turned and re-turned on its pillows. "Only--I don't understand," fretted Daphne, "about your having so many honeymoons."

"So many 'honeymoons?'" smiled the Intruding Lady. "Why, I'm thirty-two years old! And this is the very first honeymoon I've ever had in my life!"

"Why--why, you said you were on a honeymoon--down South!" frowned Daphne.

"So I did!" laughed the Intruding Lady. "And so I was! But I never said it was _my_ honeymoon!"

"Old-Dad--thought it was your honeymoon!" accused Daphne.

"Yes--I meant him to!" laughed the Intruding Lady. "Just for a little while I meant him to! . . . We'd had such a quarrel--ever since the winter before! Love at first sight it seemed to be!--and quarrel at first sight too!"

"Oh, dear me--dear me," worried Daphne. "The more I hear about this 'Love' the more [237] complicated it seems. There's even more study to it--I believe--than going to college."

"Oh, a great deal more study to it than going to college!" attested the Intruding Lady.

"But _whose_ honeymoon--was it?" persisted Daphne.

"Why, it was the honeymoon," mused the Intruding Lady, "of a very silly little chorus girl and an unduly wise New York magnate. He was very much pleased with everything about her, it seemed, except her Grammar--so I was brought along to mend the Grammar. Now wasn't that a perfectly idiotic thing to do?" she turned quite unblushingly to ask Old-Dad. "Where there are so many perfectly beautiful things to learn on a honeymoon to waste any time learning Grammar? Oh, of course, I know perfectly well"--she re-turned a bit quickly to Daphne--"that it was very wrong indeed of me to run away from them--that it caused the old magnate, at least, a considerable amount of anxiety. Only, of course, I never dreamed for a moment," she acknowledged, "that the yacht would go off without me! I merely [238] thought," she blushed, "I merely heard," she blushed, "that that was Jaffrey Bretton's Island."

"And you found him with me!" giggled Daphne, "all cuddled up in the sand."

"Yes," blushed the Intruding Lady.

With the cloud still on her brow Daphne studied the Intruding Lady's face with an entirely brand-new interest.

"But, how ever in the world," she demanded, "could anybody quarrel with my father?"

As though wanting to give full consideration to the question, the Intruding Lady glanced back at her husband before she essayed to face Daphne again.

"Why, really," she answered, "don't you suppose--that perhaps--it's because he's so tall?"

"Hardly," said Daphne.

"Well, then--maybe," mused the Intruding Lady, "it's because he's so--so funny?"

"Not at all," said Daphne.

"Well--just possibly--of course," smiled the Intruding Lady, "it's because I have red hair!" [239]

"Now you're talking!" said Jaffrey Bretton.

But no smile ruffled Daphne's gravity.

"Were you a--a sort of a teacher?" she questioned.

"Yes, a sort of a teacher," admitted the Intruding Lady.

"Where?" asked Daphne.

"Oh, on houseboats and yachts and things," smiled the Intruding Lady. "Just a sort of traveling teacher. That's why I didn't quite understand your father at first--I suppose," she acknowledged. "Our lives were so far apart."

"Do you think you understand me?" whispered Daphne.

"Oh, I understand you perfectly," smiled the Intruding Lady.

"Then what are you going to teach me?" quivered Daphne. "There are so many things I want to know! Who Lost Man was! Why people like the Outlaw _are_! Did--did Sheridan Kaire--break his word on purpose to free me?"

From the Intruding Lady's merry eyes a most astonishing tear rolled suddenly.

"First of all, Little Girl," she said, "I'm going [240] to try very--very hard to teach you to love me!"

"I'm--I'm enjoying my first lesson very much thank you," smiled Daphne faintly.

"Heaven bless my soul!" cried her father quite abruptly, "I'd forgotten all about smoking!" Adroitly with match and cigarette he proceeded to remedy the omission, brooding thoughtfully all the while on his daughter's wistful young face the positive, generous womanliness of his own chosen mate the splendid clean-limbed, clean-souled promise of the young lad before him. With more emotion than he cared to show he bent down suddenly and gathered Creep-Mouse into his arms. "There--there isn't a man in the world," he affirmed, "who has as good a--as good a dog as I have!"

"'Dog?'" deprecated Richard Wiltoner quite unexpectedly. "'Family I guess is what you mean!'"

"But even yet," questioned Daphne worriedly of the Intruding Lady, "everything's been so sudden and queer--even yet I don't quite seem to realize just how you figure in my story?" [241]

"Why, I don't suppose I figure at all," smiled the Intruding Lady very modestly, "except in so far as I do my bit towards making a Happy Ending.

"'Happy Ending?'" quickened Jaffrey Bretton. "Why this--is just the Happy Beginning!"

THE END.