As her gaze, from the platform, dwelt upon the shrewd, blade-sharp features of the man beside me, the elementary problem in her eyes seemed to redouble the peculiar, golden, Aryan beauty of her face. Let me tell you I am human. Perhaps Signet was human, too. Standing there, encompassed by the light of that royal and lovely woman's eyes, there was surely about him a glow--and a glow not altogether, it seemed to me, of "Smith's nickel and Jones's dime." I could have laughed. I could have kicked him. The impostor! Even yet I had failed to measure the man. Back on the veranda again, dinner eaten, and dusk come down, Signet brought out an old guitar from among the Dutchman's effects (it had belonged probably to that defunct nephew of the dress clothes), and as he talked he picked at the thing with idle fingers. Not altogether idle, though, I began to think. Something began to emerge by and by from the random fingerings--a rhythm, a tonal theme.--Then I had it, and there seemed to stand before me again the swarded "high place," with torches flaring over upturned faces and mounting walls of green. Almost I sensed again the beat in my blood, the eye-ravishing vision of that gold-brown flame of motion, that voluptuous priestess. "Oh, yes. That!" I murmured. "It's got something--something--that tune.--But how can you remember it?" "_She_ helps me out. I'm trying to put it in shape." Indeed, when I left that night and before my oarsmen had got me a cable's length from the beach I heard the strumming resumed, very faintly, up in the dark behind the Residence; still tentatively, with, now and then through the flawless hush of the night, the guiding note of a woman's voice. (A woman profoundly mystified.) A rehearsal? For what? For that almost mythical Broadway half around the bulge of the world? Had the fool, then, not got beyond _that_? Yet? Here he was, lord of the daughter of a queen, proprietor of a "gold mine." For Signet was not to be hoodwinked about the commercial value of Taai. All afternoon and evening, as through the two days following, while my promised cargo was getting ferried out under the shining authority of the pump gun, he scarcely let a minute go by without some word or figure to impress upon me the extent of his "possessions." To what end? Well, it all came out in a burst on the third evening, my last there. He even followed me to the beach; actually, regardless of the Dutchman's nephew's boots and trouser legs, he pursued me out into the shadows. "A gold mine! Don't be a damned boob, Dole. You can see for yourself, a big proposition for a guy like you, with a ship and everything--" Upon me he would heap all those priceless "possessions." Me! And in exchange he would ask only cabin passage for two from Taai beach to the Golden Gate. Only deck passage! Only anything!