"By the Lord!--I _will_ have her!" cried Kaire. "Why--why shouldn't I have her?" he demanded. "Fate fairly threw her into my arms just now, didn't it? I didn't know you people were here! I didn't know where in thunder you people were!--or how I was going to find you with your blooming old dog! Sitting on the beach I was, all in the dark--and--and the girl comes crawling right into my arms! 'Most shot her, I did!--thought she was some kind of a varmint! Thought----" "Daphne----" said her father. With an impetuous gesture Kaire flung the interruption aside. "She'd have run away with someone!" he cried. "Not to-night, of course! But soon! Next week! Next month! She was all primed for it! And you can't stop 'em when they once get started!--not the high-spirited [200] ones!--not when they're hurt and mad, too! And she might have done a heap sight worse than run away with me! I'm going to worship her! I'm going to give her everything she wants! I'm going to take her every place she wants to go! Why, six months from now she won't even remember that she went to the damned old college! Six months from now she'll think that being expelled from college was something she read in a comic paper! And I'm--going--to take--her," he said, with a suddenly lowered and curiously sinister positiveness, "whether you like it or not!--because she has given me her word!" "Is that true, Daphne?" asked her father. Like a little white whirlwind Daphne jumped to her feet. "Why, of course it's true, Old-Dad!" she stormed. "Live or die, sink or swim, I have given Mr. Kaire my solemnest word that I will marry him!" "An absolutely--unconditional word?" probed Bretton. "On one condition only!" triumphed Daphne. [201] "And that condition----" drawled her father. "Is a matter of confidence between your daughter and me," interposed Kaire hastily. "I respect the confidence," said Bretton. "But only a fool could fail to make half a guess of what that condition was. . . . You are keeping unconscionably sober." "What I keep is my own business!" snapped Kaire. "Per--haps," conceded Bretton. Quite casually, as one whom neither Time nor Circumstance particularly crowded, he picked up an ivory paper cutter from the table and studied it with some intentness before he spoke again. "Just what--were you doing on Martha's Island to-night, Kaire?" he asked. "What were you doing yourself?" quizzed Kaire. "Do you trade your answer for mine?" smiled Bretton. "Certainly!" said Kaire. "I was there because Martha sent for me," said Bretton. "I thought she was in some sort of trouble. I had no idea it was about you [202] and the dog. . . . You were a brick about the dog, Kaire!" he brightened abruptly. "And I sha'n't soon forget it! _But you can't have my daughter!_" Unflinching eye for unflinching eye, Sheridan Kaire answered the challenge. "I most always look Martha up when I'm down this way," he confided informationally. "I knew Martha in Paris twelve years ago."