"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 Bretton, "that it rather 199 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 200 high-spirited 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!"