keeping the head still. You will hear professionals tell their pupils
to keep their eye on the ball. Keeping the eye on the ball is only a
secondary matter. What they really mean is that the head should be kept
rigid, as otherwise it is impossible to----'
His voice died away. I had sliced my drive into the woods on the right,
and after playing another had gone off to try to find my ball, leaving
Celia and George in the ravine behind me. My last glimpse of them
showed me that her ball had fallen into a stone-studded cavity in the
side of the hill, and she was drawing her niblick from her bag as I
passed out of sight. George's voice, blurred by distance to a
monotonous murmur, followed me until I was out of earshot.
I was just about to give up the hunt for my ball in despair, when I
heard Celia's voice calling to me from the edge of the undergrowth.
There was a sharp note in it which startled me.
I came out, trailing a portion of some unknown shrub which had twined
itself about my ankle.
'Yes?' I said, picking twigs out of my hair.
'I want your advice,' said Celia.
'Certainly. What is the trouble? By the way,' I said, looking round,
'where is your fiance?'
'I have no fiance,' she said, in a dull, hard voice.
'You have broken off the engagement?'
'Not exactly. And yet--well, I suppose it amounts to that.'
'I don't quite understand.'
'Well, the fact is,' said Celia, in a burst of girlish frankness, 'I
rather think I've killed George.'
'Killed him, eh?'
It was a solution that had not occurred to me, but now that it was
presented for my inspection I could see its merits. In these days of
national effort, when we are all working together to try to make our
beloved land fit for heroes to live in, it was astonishing that nobody
before had thought of a simple, obvious thing like killing George
Mackintosh. George Mackintosh was undoubtedly better dead, but it had
taken a woman's intuition to see it.
'I killed him with my niblick,' said Celia.
I nodded. If the thing was to be done at all, it was unquestionably a
niblick shot.
'I had just made my eleventh attempt to get out of that ravine,' the
girl went on, 'with George talking all the time about the recent
excavations in Egypt, when suddenly--you know what it is when something
seems to snap----'
'I had the experience with my shoe-lace only this morning.'
'Yes, it was like that. Sharp--sudden--happening all in a moment. I
suppose I must have said something, for George stopped talking about
Egypt and said that he was reminded by a remark of the last speaker's
of a certain Irishman-----'
I pressed her hand.
'Don't go on if it hurts you,' I said, gently.
'Well, there is very little more to tell. He bent his head to light his
pipe, and well--the temptation was too much for me. That's all.'
