"But he wasn't smoking!" flared Daphne. "He was sleeping!"
"Well—a man's sleeping-room, then?" conceded her father.
"But I simply had to have that newspaper!" insisted Daphne. "I 68 tell you I won't have it flaunted all over the train! Brought into the dining-car every meal! Flapped and rustled in my face— everywhere I look! Oh, you think you're funny, do you?" she cried out furiously as with one swift dart she snatched the offending page from the stranger's unguarded grasp and tore it into shreds before his eyes. "Oh, you think you're fu—fu— funny, do you?" she began to babble hysterically.
"Yes—but Daphne," said her father with scarcely a lift to his voice, "surely you don't imagine for a moment that you're destroying the whole edition? It can't be done, you know. No one yet has ever found a way to do it. Ten years hence from a wayside hovel some well-meaning crone will hand you the page to wrap your muddy rubbers in! Five thousand miles from here, on the other side of the world, you'll open your top bureau drawer to find it lined with your own immortal features! You just simply have to get used to it, that's all. Laugh at it! Keep a laugh always handy for just that thing!"
"Laugh?", flared Daphne. With a fresh burst of fury she tore 69 the tattered page through and through again. "Well, I've destroyed this copy!" she triumphed. "No darkey porters or smirking tourists will ever see this copy! And maybe when I get to Florida," she cried, "snakes will bite me! Or typhoons shipwreck me! Or—or something happen so that I won't have to come home again! But you, Old-Dad——" Tottering ever so slightly where she stood all the hot anger in her eyes faded suddenly into the vague, sinister bewilderment of a young mind crowded dangerously near to the edge of its endurance. "You—you see nobody knew I was bad until the College President said so," she explained painstakingly to no one in particular. "I didn't even know it myself, I mean. But my father——" she rekindled instantly. Like the rippling start of a young tiger just getting ready to spring she swung around sharply on the stranger again. "Surely you didn't think for a moment that it was just myself I was thinking about in that wicked old paper?" she demanded furiously of him. "For Heaven's sake, what earthly difference do you think any such thing can make to me now? My life's over 70 and done with! But my father? The dreadful—malicious—flippant things they said about my father!"
"O—h! So it was my honor, was it, that you were defending?" asked her father a bit dryly.
As though she had not even heard the question, Daphne lifted her flaming, defiant little face to the stranger's. "Why, my Father's an angel!" she attested. "And he always was an angel! And he always will be an angel!"
"In which case," interposed her father quite abruptly, "we had better leave I think while the angeling is still good!" With a touch that looked like the graze of a butterfly's wing and felt like a lash of steel wires he curved his arm across her shoulder and swept her from the smoking-room. Once outside the curtain his directions were equally concise. "Trot along to your drawing-room, Kiddie!" he ordered. "I'll join you presently."
As he swung back into the smoking-room he almost tripped across the stranger's sprawling feet. Huddled in the corner with his 71 face buried in his hands the stranger sat sobbing like a woman.
"You are drunker than I thought!" said Jaffrey Bretton.