"I'll wager, for a man who drowned a whole kanaka crew, it was you who did the helping," Dick commented.
"She must have been forever grateful," Paula challenged, her eyes directly on Graham's. "Don't tell me she wasn't young, wasn't beautiful, wasn't a golden brown young goddess."
"Her mother was the Queen of Huahoa," Graham answered. "Her father was a Greek scholar and an English gentleman. They were dead at the time of the swim, and Nomare was queen herself. She was young. She was beautiful as any woman anywhere in the world may be beautiful. Thanks to her father's skin, she as not golden brown. She was tawny golden. But you've heard the story undoubtedly--"
He broke off with a look of question to Dick, who shook his head.
Calls and cries and splashings of water from beyond a screen of trees warned them that they were near the tank.
"You'll have to tell me the rest of the story some time," Paula said.
"Dick knows it. I can't see why he hasn't told you."
She shrugged her shoulders.
"Perhaps because he's never had the time or the provocation."
"God wot, it's had wide circulation," Graham laughed. "For know that I was once morganatic--or whatever you call it--king of the cannibal isles, or of a paradise of a Polynesian isle at any rate.--'By a purple wave on an opal beach in the hush of the Mahim woods,'" he hummed carelessly, in conclusion, and swung off from his horse.
"'The white moth to the closing vine, the bee to the opening clover,'" she hummed another line of the song, while The Fop nearly got his teeth into her leg and she straightened him out with the spur, and waited for Dick to help her off and tie him.
"Cigars!--I'm in on that!--you can't catch her!" Bert Wainwright called from the top of the high dive forty feet above. "Wait a minute! I'm coming!"
And come he did, in a swan dive that was almost professional and that brought handclapping approval from the girls.
"A sweet dive, balanced beautifully," Graham told him as he emerged from the tank.
Bert tried to appear unconscious of the praise, failed, and, to pass it off, plunged into the wager.
"I don't know what kind of a swimmer you are, Graham," he said, "but I just want in with Dick on the cigars."
"Me, too; me, too!" chorused Ernestine, and Lute, and Rita.