Old-Dad. Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
won't need anything—academic in the place we're heading for! It's not any South that you've ever heard of that we're going to, you understand?" he explained with the faintest possible tint of edginess in his tone. "No Palm Beaches! No pink sash-ribbons! No tennis! No velvet golf courses! No airy—fairy—anythings! But a South below the South! 36 A South all heat and glare and sweat and jet-greens jungles! Tropics and slime! Rough! Tough! Pretty nasty some of the time. Violently beautiful—almost always! And we're going down to hunt!" he added with certain decisiveness. "And to fish! And to study citrus fruits when there's nothing else to do! And you might just as well know it now as later," he resumed with all his old insouciance. "I—am—also going to find me a wife if such a thing is humanly possible."
"A—wife?" gasped the girl. "Oh, this—this eternal marrying business!" she shivered. "If it's all so dreadful, about men, I mean, why do women keep marrying? What's the righteousness of it? What's the decency? What's it all about?"
"Don't forget that I'm one of these 'dreadful men,'" smiled her father.
"Yes—I—know," quivered the girl.
"But——" Like a butterfly slipping out of its cocoon one shoulder slipped lacy-white from the blue puffy-quilt. "What about my own mother?" she demanded.
"Your mother has been dead for fifteen years," said the man.
"Yes—but Father," persisted the girl. 37
With folded arms the man stood watching her bright young color wax—and wane again.
"If there's anything you want to ask," he suggested, "maybe you'd better ask it now—and get it over with."
"Oh, I didn't want to be inquisitive," stammered the girl. "It's only that—that servants and relatives talk so—and I know so little. You—you and mother didn't live together, did you?" she questioned quite abruptly.
"No," said the man.
"You—you mean there was trouble?" flushed the girl.
"There was—some trouble," said the man.
"You mean that you—didn't like her?" probed the merciless little voice.
"No—I—didn't—like her," said the man without a flicker of expression.
Clutching the blue quilt about her the girl jumped to the floor and ran swiftly to him.
"Oh, Father!" she cried. "Whatever in the world will I do if you don't like me?"
"But I do like you!" smiled her father. Shy as a boy he reached out and touched her sunny hair. "Only one condition!" he rallied 38 with sudden and unaffected sternness. "When you broke into my study just now you called me 'Old-Dad'! Up to that moment I had considered myself—some—young—buck. Never again—as long as you live—I warn you—ever call me anything except Old-Dad! Darned if it isn't sobering!"
II
39
THE scene that Daphne had left behind her two thousand miles or more, though more academic of course, was none the less poignant to the one most concerned.
Deflected by a more or less erudite lecture-obligation to a town at least gossip-distance away, no faintest rumor of any college chaos whatsoever had reached John Burnarde's ears till the evening after the dance, when just recrossing the well-worn threshold of his beautiful, austere study, the shrill harsh clang of his telephone bell rang down the curtain on what had been the most exquisitely perfect episode of even his fastidious life.
Yet even then no whisper prepared him for what the alarm was all about. Poor John Burnarde!
Whatever else an academic training may teach an undergraduate it has certainly never taught a member of the faculty what to do 40 when summoned post-haste to the President's office to consult with various other members of the faculty on what has been pronounced "a most flagrant breach of moral as well as of academic standards" he finds the case to be the exceedingly delicate one of a girl-student caught entertaining a man in her room late at night—and the girl herself—his fiancée!
That the betrothal at that moment was known only to himself and the girl gave John Burnarde the last long breath, he felt, that he should ever draw again.
Still a bit flushed, a bit breezy, with his brisk sprint across the chill November campus, he was just slipping out of his overcoat in the doorway of the President's office when the name "Daphne Bretton" first struck across his startled senses. Half hampered by a balky overshoe, half pinioned by a ripped sleeve- lining he thrust his head alone into the conference.
"What?" he demanded.
"This will hit Burnarde rather roughly, I'm afraid," whispered the History Man to the Biology Woman. "She's quite his star English pupil, I imagine. Has done one little bit of lyric verse 41 already, they say, that is really rather remarkable. Very young of course, very ingenuous, but quite remarkably knowing."
"Maybe now we can guess where she gets her 'knowingness,'" murmured the new Bible Instructor behind her pure white ringers.
"What?" demanded John Burnarde all over again. The winter wind seemed to have faded oddly from one cheek but was still spotting hecticly in the other. "What?" he persisted bewilderedly, still struggling with his overshoes.
"Why it's the Bretton girl!" prompted a sharp voice from some dark seat in the corner.
"That pretty little Bretton girl," regretted a gentler tone.
"Yes—I—I—know who you mean," stammered Burnarde. "But—but——"
"Always made me think of apple-blossoms—somehow," confided the old Mathematics professor a bit surreptitiously.
"Apple-blossoms?" mumbled poor Burnarde.
"So sort of pink and white and fresh and—and fragrant. 'Pon my 42 soul when she comes into my class and takes a front seat it makes me feel a little queer. It's like being a boy again! Young grass, May morning, and a wind through the apple orchard! Fragrancy? Yes, that's it!"
"Yes, it's just exactly the flagrancy of it that makes the scandal so complete!" interposed the President's keenly incisive feminine voice.
Instantly every eye except Burnarde's reverted to the unquestionable dominance of the President's ash-blond personality.
Burnarde alone, looming lean, keen, tense, on the edge of the group, with five generations of poise and reticence masking the precipitant horror in his mind, stood staring blankly from one face to another of his cruder-birthed associates.
"I—protest!" he said.
"Protest?" questioned the President's coolly inflected voice. "Protest what?" With a graceful if somewhat studied gesture of patience Miss Claudia Merriwayne laid down her jotting pencil and narrowed her cold gray eyes to the eyes of her youngest 43 professor. "You were a little late getting here I think, Mr. Burnarde," she admonished him perfectly courteously, "but the general circumstances of the case you have gleaned quite sufficiently, I think, even in this last brief moment or so? Surely in a case so—so distressing," she flushed, "it will not be necessary for us to—to revive the details in all their entirety? In the half hour that we have been discussing the matter. It is a half hour, isn't it?" she turned sharply and asked of her nearest neighbor.
"Fully a half hour!" gloated the nearest neighbor.
"Miss Bretton, of course, will have to leave college," resumed the President succinctly. "Definitely—positive expulsion is, of course, the only path open to us!"
"I protest!" said John Burnarde.
From some half-shadowed corner directly in front of him a distinctly Continental smile flared up on a French instructor's face. Close