't they do if he fell in a fit?
Their best wouldn't be too good for him. They've got too much money
tied up in him to let him lie. They'd take him into their homes and
hand-nurse him like a brother. Let me tell you, honesty in paying bills
ain't what it's cracked up to be."

"What's this Narii chap got to do with it?" was the Englishman's
short-tempered demand. And, turning to Grief, he said, "What's all this
pearl nonsense? Begin at the beginning."

"You'll have to help me out," Grief warned the others, as he began. "Old
Parlay is a character. From what I've seen of him I believe he's partly
and mildly insane. Anyway, here's the story: Parlay's a full-blooded
Frenchman. He told me once that he came from Paris. His accent is the
true Parisian. He arrived down here in the old days. Went to trading
and all the rest. That's how he got in on Hikihoho. Came in trading when
trading was the real thing. About a hundred miserable Paumotans lived
on the island. He married the queen--native fashion. When she died,
everything was his. Measles came through, and there weren't more than a
dozen survivors. He fed them, and worked them, and was king. Now before
the queen died she gave birth to a girl. That's Armande. When she was
three he sent her to the convent at Papeete. When she was seven or eight
he sent her to France. You begin to glimpse the situation. The best
and most aristocratic convent in France was none too good for the only
daughter of a Paumotan island king and capitalist, and you know the old
country French draw no colour line. She was educated like a princess,
and she accepted herself in much the same way. Also, she thought she was
all-white, and never dreamed of a bar sinister.

"Now comes the tragedy. The old man had always been cranky and erratic,
and he'd played the despot on Hikihoho so long that he'd got the idea
in his head that there was nothing wrong with the king--or the princess
either. When Armande was eighteen he sent for her. He had slews and
slathers of money, as Yankee Bill would say. He'd built the big house on
Hikihoho, and a whacking fine bungalow in Papeete. She was to arrive on
the mail boat from New Zealand, and he sailed in his schooner to meet
her at Papeete. And he might have carried the situation off, despite the
hens and bull-beasts of Papeete, if it hadn't been for the hurricane.
That was the year, wasn't it, when Manu-Huhi was swept and eleven
hundred drowned?"

The others nodded, and Ca