"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?"