56

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.

Being only eighteen and having thus far evolved no special 57 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 58 distinctly 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!"

"Oh, yes, of course, I saw it," confided the second. "A whole 59 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.

"When geese are cackling," said her father. 60

"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 sorrow you'll ever meet leak into 61 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 62 of her face 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.

The rumble of the train is at least a pleasant sound. And when one's 63 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 to be with a great, smooth-running, 64 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.

Maybe too much "looking back" even from the last car of a train 65 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.

"Eh? What?" jumped the Kissing Man. 66

"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!" By no means 67 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!" insisted Daphne. "I 68 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 burst of fury she tore 69 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 can make to me now? My life's over 70 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.

"There are never but two reasons why a man pursues a woman," 72 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.

"Very young," acknowledged the stranger. 74

"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.

"I apologize in all languages!" he hastened to affirm. 75

"'Jeg beklager at jeg har vÆret uhÖflig.' 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," confided Jaffrey 76 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 77 inexhaustible amusement! Brand-new every 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 79 his 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 overboard— an—an old lady jumped up and kissed me. Oughtn't she to have?" 80 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, quite abruptly, 81 "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.

"You little—funny—furious—Baby," he began, twitched his queer 82 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 83 Christmas Cantata, the quite 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 so slightly to one side 84 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 with 85 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 of his face from the lower he 86 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 87 busts they bogs down. And jes' as soon as they bogs 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 miracle of love, 88 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.

"Well, I'd like to know," he demanded, "how you happen to know 89 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 thought 90 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!"

"For—me?" questioned Daphne. With incredulous fingers she took 91 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."

"Which being interpreted?" questioned her father. 92

"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. Then quite 93 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 94 is doing pretty well. 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 ever held anybody in yours. But 95 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!——'"