On Sheridan Kaire's incongruous, dissolute face, a smile as tortured-sweet as hers quickened for a single unbelievable instant and was gone again. As one puzzled only, he turned back to Bretton, and stood staring almost vacantly into the older man's impatient eyes. Then quite abruptly he turned and started toward the door. "I--I feel a little faint," he said. "A little queer. . . . I will be back in a moment!" With a sharp bang the door shut behind him. In the passage outside they heard a single rough word, a woman's imperious protest, the soft thud of feet on a thick carpet, and a cabin boy's shrill call. [216] On the carved mahogany shelf in the cabin the clock went on about its business--one minute--three--five--ten. Through the open portholes a faint breeze sucked at the crimson silk curtains, and ripple to creak, and creak to ripple, the houseboat yearned to the tide and the tide to the houseboat. Daphne's eyes never left the clock. Weirdly exultant, excitantly heroic, she kept the ill-favored tryst. Blurred in the smoke of his cigarette, Jaffrey Bretton's vivid white head merged like a half-erased drawing into the big shimmering mirror behind him. It was just as well, perhaps, that the twist of his mouth was hidden from Daphne's eyes. There was no sound of voices in the outer passageway to herald Sheridan Kaire's return: just a little stumble on the edge of a rug--an unwonted fumble with the door handle. It wasn't defiance that backed him up now against the support of the wainscoating, but a very faint uncertainty in his legs. There was nothing uncertain, however, about his face. Geniality, not to say, jocularity, [217] wreathed it from ear to ear and from brow to chin. "Sorry to have kept you waiting so long, dear--dear people," he beamed. "But a Host has so many responsibilities . . . . Overseeing the pantries and the--the libraries and the ladies!" he beamed. "Why--why, I can't help my way with the ladies!" he turned and explained with half-mocking anxiety to Jaffrey Bretton's absolutely inscrutable face. "Always, ever since I was a little boy," he deprecated, "I've been the Village cut-up! So was my father before me, and his father before--before me. Too bad, isn't it?" he questioned sharply. "Such a nice family! And so lively!" At an unexpected glimpse of his face in the mirror he turned back to meet Daphne's staring face. "Now this scar of mine, darling--darling," he confided dramatically, "you want to know where I got it? All the ladies always want to know where I got it! Just as soon as a lady gets up her courage to ask me about it," he chuckled, "then I always know she's really beginning to think of me! You asked if I got it in a 'brave war,'" he chuckled. "Sure I got it in [218] a brave war. Only the brave deserve--affairs," he parodied lightly. "It was in Smyrna," he confided, "when I was eighteen. I--I made a little poem about it: