Joggling back to his warm, plushy Pullman car from the cindery murk and chill of the observation platform it was then that Jaffrey Bretton sensed through the tail of his eye, as it were, the kaleidoscopic blur of a scuffle in the smoking-room. Tweed-brown, newspaper-white, broadcloth-blue, the fleeting impress struck across his jaded optic nerve, till roused by a sudden lurch of his heart to the familiar blueness of that blue he whirled around in the narrow aisle and yanked aside the curtain just in time to behold a perfectly strange young man forcing a kiss on Daphne's infuriated lips. "But I _am_ Daphne Bretton! I _am_! I _am_!" fought the girl. "Why, of course, you're 'Daphne Bretton!'" kissed the man. "So why be so particular?" "And I--happen to be Daphne Bretton's--father!" hailed Jaffrey Bretton quite incisively from the doorway. [66] "Eh? _What_?" jumped the Kissing Man. "Oh--O--h!" gasped Daphne. With a somewhat hectic attempt at nonchalance the Kissing Man stooped down and picked up the crumpled newspaper at his feet. "Well, it's my newspaper, anyway!" he grinned. "It's mine if I want it!" began Daphne all over again. With a quick jerk of his wrist the stranger twisted the newspaper from the girl's snatching fingers and began rather awkwardly to smooth out the crumple and piece together the fragments. It was the pictorial supplement of a week-old Sunday paper and from its front page loomed an almost life-sized portrait of Daphne extravagantly bordered and garnished with what some cheap cartoonist considered a facetious portrayal of Daphne's recent tragedy. "Do--you want your head--kicked off?" asked Jaffrey Bretton. "No, I don't," admitted the stranger. "But even if I did," he confided with undismayed diablerie, "how ever in the world should we locate it? I seem to have lost it so badly!" [67] By no means unattractive even in his impudence he turned his flushed, indecorous face to Daphne and in the sudden tilt of his deeply-cleft chin the electric light struck down rather mercilessly across a faint white scar that slashed zig-zag from his turbid, reckless eyes to a most ingenuous dimple in his left cheek. "You are--drunk!" said Jaffrey Bretton quite frankly. "Yes, a little," admitted the stranger. "But even so," he persisted with an elaborate bow. "But even so, the young lady here will hardly contend, I think, that I acted entirely without provocation!" "Provocation?" questioned Jaffrey Bretton. With the faintest perceptible frown blackening between his brows he turned to his daughter. "Daphne," he said, "don't you know that you haven't any business to enter a man's smoking-room?" "But he wasn't smoking!" flared Daphne. "He was sleeping!" "Well--a man's sleeping-room, then?" conceded her father.