Across the sweet-scented blur of a fresh cigarette the older man's eyes narrowed suddenly to two mere glints of steel.
"I—I hated the way you kissed my little girl!" he said.
"Y—yes?" stammered the stranger.
"That youngster of mine is such a—little youngster," mused Jaffrey Bretton perfectly evenly. "So totally inexperienced! So 78 desperately affrighted and bewildered already with the untoward happenings of the past week! Personally," he persisted, "I want neither Prude nor Wanton in my family, but either one of them— unfortunately—is made only too easily out of the same sex- shock. In view of which case and under all existing circumstances— you have made it considerably harder, I think, for my little girl to reconstruct normal sex standards while that particular kiss of yours remains the last one in her memory. So I will thank you," said Jaffrey Bretton, "to accompany me now to her drawing-room and show her as best you may how even a man like you can kiss a woman 'Good-night' instead of 'Bad-night!'"
"What?" jumped the stranger.
Starkly for an instant he probed Jaffrey Bretton's unflinching eyes. Then rubbing one hand for a single instant across his clammy forehead he followed Jaffrey Bretton out through the plushy green curtain into the aisle.
In the general joggle of the train it was comfortable for each perhaps that the other's footsteps swayed no more, no less, than 79 his own. Even outside Daphne's door the footing was none too certain.
"Let us in!" cried Daphne's father quite peremptorily.
In a vague mist of rumpled gold hair and soft white negligee Daphne opened the door and ushered the two men into her trig little room.
Without a moment's delay Jaffrey Bretton sprung the question that was already on his lips. "Daphne—have you ever been kissed very much?"