In fact, they trace their genealogies always by the female line.«

To this both Chauncey Delarouse and Bruce Cadogan Cavendish nodded prompt affirmation.

»Ah,« said Percival, »I perceive you both know the South Seas, wherefore, without undue expenditure of verbiage on my part, I am assured that you will appreciate the charm of my princess, the Princess Tui-nui of Talofa, the Princess of the Isle of Love.«

He kissed his hand to her, sipped from his condensed milk can a man-size drink of druggist's alcohol, and to her again kissed his hand.

»But she was coy, and ever she fluttered near to me but never near enough. When my arm went out to her to girdle her, presto, she was not there. I knew, as never before, nor since, the thousand dear and delightful anguishes of love frustrate but ever resilient and beckoned on by the very goddess of love.«

»Some vocabulary,« Bruce Cadogan Cavendish muttered in aside to Chauncey Delarouse. But Percival Delaney was not to be deterred. He kissed his pudgy hand aloft into the night and held warmly on.

»No fond agonies of rapture deferred that were not lavished upon me by my dear Princess, herself ever a luring delight of promise flitting just beyond my reach. Every sweet lover's inferno unguessed of by Dante she led me through. Ah! Those tropic nights! Those swooning tropic nights, under our palm trees, the distant surf a languorous murmur as from some vast sea shell of mystery, when she, my Princess, all but melted to my yearning, and with her laughter, that was as silver strings by buds and blossoms smitten, all but made lunacy of my lover's ardency.

It was by my wrestling with the champions of Talofa that I first interested her. It was by my prowess at swimming that I awoke her. And it was by a certain swimming deed that I won from her more than coquettish smiles and shy timidities of feigned retreat.

We were squidding that day, out on the reef – you know how, undoubtedly, diving down the face of the wall of the reef, five fathoms, ten fathoms, any depth within reason, and shoving our squid-sticks into the likely holes and crannies of the coral where squid might be lairing. With the squid-stick, bluntly sharp at both ends, perhaps a foot long, and held crosswise in the hand, the trick was to gouge any lazying squid until he closed his tentacles around fist, stick, and arm. Then you had him, and came to the surface with him, and bit him in the head which is in the center of him, and peeled him off into the waiting canoe. ... And to think I used to do that!«

Percival Delaney paused a moment, a glimmer of awe on his rotund face, as he contemplated the mighty picture of his youth.

»Why, I've pulled out a squid, with tentacles eight feet long, and done it under fifty feet of water. I could stay down four minutes. I've gone down, with a coral-rock to sink me, in a hundred and ten feet to clear a fouled anchor. And I could back-dive with a once-over and go in feet-first from eighty feet above the surface –«

»Quit it, delete it, cease it,« Chauncey Delarouse admonished testily. »Tell of the Princess. That's what makes old blood leap again. Almost can I see her. Was she very wonderful?«

Percival Delaney kissed unutterable affirmation.

»I have said she was a mermaid. She was. I know she swam thirty-six hours before being rescued, after her schooner was capsized in a double-squall. I have seen her do ninety feet and bring up pearl shell in each hand. She was wonderful. As a woman she was ravishing, sublime. I have said she was a sea-goddess. She was. Oh, for a Phidias or a Praxiteles to have made the wonder of her body immortal!

And that day, out for squid on the reef, I was almost sick for her. Mad – I know I was mad for her. We would step over the side from the big canoe, and swim down, side by side, into the delicious depths of cool and color, and she would look at me, as we swam, and with her eyes tantalize me to further madness.