"Isn't most everything dangerous," laughed Jaffrey Bretton, "if you don't handle it right? A fifth-story window? A knife and fork? A blank sheet of paper? The buttons on your coat? Yet only a fool jumps through the fifth-story window, or tries to cram the sheet of paper into his eye, or—" With a gasp of apprehension he turned suddenly on Daphne. "You are white!" he said.
Who was this woman—what was she to her father?
Twice Daphne opened her lips to cry out the question—the accusation, the bewilderment that was consuming her. Then, with a really heroic effort, she swung in her tracks and ran off at full speed toward the launch.
"Hurry up, you—you slow-pokes!" she turned and called back when 147 neither the quiver of her lips nor the blur of her eyes could be gleaned through the distance.
In another five minutes, with a great churn of water, a great chug of engine, a great stench of gasoline, the little old rickety launch was on its way.
It was still very bright, very hot; but already, as though for sheer weight and wiltedness, the huge sun lolled in its orbit, and like a turbulent bed smoothed out at last for the night the green mangrove-pillow and white sand-sheet of the fast-receding shore gleamed soft and cool at last above the taut blue blanket of the Gulf.
Perched high in the bow of the launch Daphne sat staring back at her traveling companions—the puny Outlaw, the gigantic Lost Man, her own most distinguished-looking father, and the mysterious lady. Like a crippled phonograph record her mind seemed to catch suddenly on that phrase "her most distinguished-looking father and the mysterious lady—the mysterious lady." . . . And they were all bound somewhere on a mysterious errand—an all-night 148 mysterious errand concerning some mad woman who didn't like red and— and——Quite alarmingly her heart began to pound and pound and pound! "And a month ago," she thought, "I was getting up when bells rang, and going to bed when bells rang, and thinking when bells rang, and stopping thinking when bells rang!" In a curious little shiver she looked up suddenly to find Lost Man's eyes fixed on hers with a distinctly benign and apostolic smile, but even as he smiled he hunched his shoulders up, clapped his hands together and burst once more into the old English song:
"Diaphenia, like the daffadowndilly,
White as the sun, fair as the lily. . . ."
With a single outcry, Daphne tossed back her head and shrieked her nerves into space.