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. Quite casually above the spurt and flare of his 185 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.