"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. "Boxes of candy, gloves, or any truck you care to risk," Ernestine added. "But I don't know Mrs. Forrest's records, either," Graham protested, after having taken on the bets. "However, if in five minutes--" "Ten minutes," Paula said, "and to start from opposite ends of the tank. Is that fair? Any touch is a catch." Graham looked his hostess over with secret approval. She was clad, not in the single white silk slip she evidently wore only for girl parties, but in a coquettish imitation of the prevailing fashion mode, a suit of changeable light blue and green silk--almost the color of the pool; the skirt slightly above the knees whose roundedness he recognized; with long stockings to match, and tiny bathing shoes bound on with crossed ribbons. On her head was a jaunty swimming cap no jauntier than herself when she urged the ten minutes in place of five. Rita Wainwright held the watch, while Graham walked down to the other end of the hundred-and-fifty-foot tank.