Old-Dad. Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

I

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      UNTIL Daphne Bretton's peremptory departure from college she had neither known nor liked her father well enough to distinguish him with a nick name. But on that momentous day in question, when blurting into the problematical presence of an unfamiliar parent in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar city she flung her unhappy news across his book-cluttered desk, the appellation slipped from her stark lips as though it were the only fluid phrase in a wooden-throated world.

      "Old-Dad!" she said, "I have been expelled from college!"

      From under the incongruous thatch of his snow-white hair her young father lifted his extraordinarily young face with a snarl like the snarl of a startled animal.

      "Why?—Why Daphne!" he gasped. "What?"

      With her small gloved hand fumbling desperately at the great 2 muffly collar of her coat the young girl repeated her statement.

      "I—I have been expelled from college!" she said.

      "Yes, but Daphne!—What for?" demanded her father. His own face was suddenly as white as hers, his lips as stark. "What for?" he persisted.

      Twice the young girl's lips opened and shut in an utter agony of inarticulation. Then quite sharply the blonde head lifted, the shoulders squared, and the whole slender, quivering little body braced itself to meet the traditional blow of the traditional Avenger.

      "For—for having a boy in my room—at night," said the girl.

      Before the dumb, abject misery in the young blue eyes that lifted so heavily to his, a grin like the painted grin on a sick clown's face shot suddenly across the father's mobile mouth.

      "Oh I hope he was a nice boy!" he said quite abruptly. "Blonde or brunette?"

      "Why—Why—Father!" stammered the girl. "I—I thought you would—3 would kill me!"

      "Kill you?" mumbled her father. More essentially at the moment he seemed concerned with an overturned bottle of ink that was splashing its sinister pool across his morning's work. "Kill you?" he repeated vaguely. Across the high, intervening barrier of books and catalogues he craned his neck suddenly with a certain sharp intentness.

      "And is your shoulder broken, too?" he asked very gently.

      "My shoulder?" quivered the girl.

      "It sags so," murmured her father.

      "It's my suit-case," said the girl. "My heavy suit-case."

      "Why not put it down?" asked the man.

      Across

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