Immediately the girls deposited Honey on the sand.
“Did you notice the cleverness of that breakaway?” said Pete. “He couldn’t have got a clinch in anywhere.”
But to do Honey justice, he attempted nothing of the sort. He lay flat and still until his rescuers were at a safe height. Then he sat up and smiled radiantly at them. “Ladies, I thank you,” he said.
“And I’ll see that you get a Carnegie medal if it takes the rest of my life. I guess,” he remarked unabashed, as his companions joined him, “it will be fresh-water swimming for your little friend hereafter.”
Nobody spoke for a while. His companions were still white and Billy Fairfax even shook.
“You looked like an engraving that used to hang over my bed when I was a child,” said Ralph, with an attempt at humor that had, coming from him, a touching quality, “a bunch of, angels lugging a dead man to heaven. You’d have been a ringer for it if you’d had a shave.”
“Well, the next time the girls come, I’m going to swim out among the pretty sharks,” said Pete, obviously trying to echo Ralph’s light note. “By Jove, hear them chatter up there. They’re talking all at once and at the top of their lungs just like your sisters and your cousins and your aunts.”
“They’re as pale as death, too,” observed Billy. “Look at that!”
The flying-maidens had come together in a compact circular group, hands over each other’s shoulders, wings faintly fluttering. Perceptibly they clung to each other for support. Their faces had turned chalky; their heads drooped. Intertwined thus, they drifted out of sight.
“Lord, they are beautiful, close-to!” Honey said. “You never saw such complexions! Or such eyes and teeth! And—and—by George, such an effect of purity and stainlessness. I feel like a—and yet, by—.” He fell into an abstraction so deep that it was as though he had forgotten his companions.