“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.