Wilting down on his breast again he heard her swallow pretty hard several times before her muffled answer came.
"It's—it's all," she said, "except, of course, the refrain 'Yo-ho,' etc."
Chuckling softly to himself for a moment her father sat staring off across the crown of her head at the shifting car-window landscape of orange groves, palm trees, and pine.
"Couldn't you pat me a little?" came the sweet, muffled voice again.
"I darsn't," said her father. "If I should unclasp a single hand you'd go bumpety-bump on the floor."
"O—h," sighed Daphne, "but couldn't you even—pat me with your voice?"
"'Pat you with my voice?'" puzzled her father. With a quiver of muscles his strong arms tightened round her. "Why, you poor baby," he cried, "you poor lonesome little kiddie! You——"
"Why does everybody think I'm so little?" protested Daphne. With considerable effort she struggled up again, "You and John—— 101 Burnarde—and the—and the Kissing Man! Every one of you called me 'a baby.' But that Wiltoner boy—at the dance that night," she faltered, "he treated me as though I was quite grown up and real. Right in the midst of a dance it was he asked me about bread machines. Asked my advice about bread machines, I mean! And I loved it!"
"Did you ever see a bread machine?" quizzed her father.
"N—o," admitted Daphne, "but it sounds so real! But what I want to know," she hurried on quite irrelevantly, "is about this place—this wild, desert-islandy sort of place that we're going to. Will that seem real?"