Nothing else on land or sea dozed or dallied because of the heat.
"Slam—Bang—Bang" for a glistening mile the big billows boomed and roared on the beach. Fantastic as a shadow with a shine to it, the gray sharks slashed and reslashed through the churning tide! High overhead in inestimable thousands white gulls furled and feathered in ecstatic maneuver! Far on the outer reef bright Spanish mackerel leaped in the sun! And startlingly outlined across the horizon, as though in deliberate mockery of all man's futile efforts to walk on the water, a gigantic kite-shaped whipperee went reeling tipsily from wave to wave!
With a gasp of almost pagan joy Jaffrey Bretton repeated his question.
"Even with all this," he insisted, "can't you be happy—any?"
"Oh, Old-Dad," shivered Daphne, "you know just as well as I do 110 that I would be perfectly happy if only I could forget!"
"Forget what?" said her father.
"Forget the hideous thing the President called me!" quivered Daphne. "Forget that——that awful letter my room-mate's mother wrote me! . . . Forget the newspapers! . . . Forget—forget— everything!"
With a shrug of his shoulders, Jaffrey Bretton gestured back to the camp fire at the edge of the cactus thicket where, crouched before the fragrant coffee pot in a scarecrow suit of gay- colored ginghams, a weirdly majestic looking old man with long scraggly hair and sharply aquiline features added the one tragic note to the scene.
"Lost Man has—'forgotten everything,'" he confided, a bit dryly.
"Forgotten everything?" repeated Daphne.