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.