"EVERY man, once in his lifetime," gloated Jaffrey Bretton, "has craved the adventurous experience of being marooned on a coral island with a beautiful lady!"
From eyes that brooded only too soberly on the bright tropic scene all around her, Daphne shot back a faintly amused and frankly deprecatory smile.
"Oh, of course I meant an unrelated 'beautiful lady,'" murmured her father.
As swiftly as it had come the faint smile vanished again.
Shrugging the hot salt and sand from his blue-jersied shoulders her father gathered his bare brown knees into the curve of his bare brown arms and surveyed her suddenly with a most ferocious frown.
"Daphne," he ordered, "never inhale your smile! Nicotine itself is no more injurious to one's 'in'ards than is an inhaled smile." With a sweep of the hand he seemed in that single moment 108 to include the whole shining universe in the measure of his reproach. "Even with all—this," he demanded, "can't you be happy—any?"
Certainly no one could have denied that it was a shining universe!
Like a cake of white soap splashing in a pan of bluing, the little island gleamed in the Gulf! Whiteness beyond your wildest dreams of whiteness! Blueness beyond your wildest dreams of blueness! Pearl, azure, indigo, turquoise, ultramarine—all sizzling together in the merciless sun!
Green there was too, of course—the vivid, clattering green of majestic cocoanut palms, the virescent flare of beech-grass, the crisp fan of scrub palmetto, and always the great, glossy mangrove trees rearing like giant laurel bushes in the dark, dustless splendor. But green in the Gulf, somehow, always seems like man's idea, or woman's—a sheer after-thought, as it were, of shade or trimmings. All the blue gulf wants is glare—and the eternal chance to grind pale rain bow-tinted shells into white sand!
Cuddled to the white sand but hiding from the glare, Jaffrey 109 Bretton lolled in the pale shadow of an old wreck, staring out into the radiance. Half a rod away from him in a slim blue swimming suit that exactly matched his own, Daphne lay basking in her own sand nest.