"Yes—if you could prove that you were my fairy prince——" laughed Daphne.
"Pumpkin coach—and all?" cried the man. His hands on her shoulders were like electric shocks.
"Pumpkin coach and all!" whispered Daphne. To save her soul she 161 could not have told just why she whispered.
With an odd little smile the young man released his hold on her shoulders and snatched her hand again.
"Then come quick!" he cried.
Maybe it wasn't "running," but it was very much like it! Zig-zag across the beach, up through the palmetto thicket, clattering across an unexpected pile of old tin cans, out into the soft sand again of a sheltered cove, a coral harbor, where blazing with lights like a Christmas tree a big house-boat lay at its moorings.
"There!" cried the young man, "the pumpkin coach!"
"Why—wherever in the world did it come from?" gasped Daphne. Her heart was beating so that she could scarcely speak. "Wherever—in the world?"
Swaying a little on her feet her shoulder brushed ever so slightly against her companion's, and she turned to find herself snatched into the steel-sinewed arms, the relentless dove-voiced urgency of the first passion she had ever seen! This was no 162 hoydenish tussle with an unnerved man who thought you were a panther! This was no snub-nosed smother against the breast of a boy who was trying to keep you from screaming! This was no idyl of the Class Room, no airy persiflage of the poets! But Passion itself! Raw Passion, too! A thing tender, terrifying, beyond her wildest dreams of tenderness of terror! The desperate, determinate, all but irresistible pleading of a man who was fighting if not for life itself, at least for the last joy that his life would ever know!
"Oh, little girl!" he pleaded, "I'm mad about you! Do you doubt it? Absolutely mad!" His question marks were kisses, his exclamation points, more kisses. "Ever since that night, only six weeks ago, was it, when I stumbled on you in the hotel? I was drunk then, wasn't I? Well, I'm sober enough now! But drunk or sober there hasn't been a minute since, day or night, when I haven't been trying to follow you! Give me your lips!"