Like a person distracted, Kaire stood staring all around him. 215 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.
On the carved mahogany shelf in the cabin the clock went on 216 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.