“You will not go upstairs,” barked William.
“We shall get on much better there,” explained Anastatia. “Rodney has fitted up the top-floor back as an indoor practising room.”
Jane darted forward with a maternal cry.
“My poor child, has this scoundrel dared to delude you by pretending to be a golfer? Darling, he is nothing of the kind.”
Mr. Reginald Brown coughed. For some moments he had been twitching restlessly.
“Talking of golf,” he said, “it might interest you to hear of a little experience I had the other day at Marshy Moor. I had got a nice drive off the tee, nothing record-breaking, you understand, but straight and sweet. And what was my astonishment on walking up to play my second to find—”
“A rather similar thing happened to me at Windy Waste last Tuesday,” interrupted Mr. Delancey. “I had hooked my drive the merest trifle, and my caddie said to me, ‘You’re out of bounds.’ ‘I am not out of bounds,’ I replied, perhaps a little tersely, for the lad had annoyed me by a persistent habit of sniffing. ‘Yes, you are out of bounds,’ he said. ‘No, I am not out of bounds,’ I retorted. Well, believe me or believe me not, when I got up to my ball—”
“Shut up!” said William.
“Just as you say, sir,” replied Mr. Delancey, courteously.
Rodney Spelvin drew himself up, and in spite of her loathing for his villainy Jane could not help feeling what a noble and romantic figure he made. His face was pale, but his voice did not falter.
“You are right,” he said. “I am not a golfer. But with the help of this splendid girl here, I hope humbly to be one some day. Ah, I know what you are going to say,” he went on, raising a hand. “You are about to ask how a man who has wasted his life as I have done can dare to entertain the mad dream of ever acquiring a decent handicap. But never forget,” proceeded Rodney, in a low, quivering voice, “that Walter J. Travis was nearly forty before he touched a club, and a few years later he won the British Amateur.”
“True,” murmured William.
“True, true,” said Mr. Delancey and Mr. Brown. They lifted their bowler hats reverently.
“I am thirty-three years old,” continued Rodney, “and for fourteen of those thirty-three years I have been writing poetry—aye, and novels with a poignant sex-appeal, and if ever I gave a thought to this divine game it was but to sneer at it. But last summer I saw the light.”
“Glory! Glory!” cried Mr. Brown.
“One afternoon I was persuaded to try a drive. I took the club with a mocking, contemptuous laugh.” He paused, and a wild light came into his eyes. “I brought off a perfect snifter,” he said, emotionally. “Two hundred yards and as straight as a whistle. And, as I stood there gazing after the ball, something seemed to run up my spine and bite me in the neck. It was the golf-germ.”
“Always the way,” said Mr. Brown. “I remember the first drive I ever made. I took a nice easy stance—”
“The first drive I made,” said Mr. Delancey, “you won’t believe this, but it’s a fact, was a full—”
“From that moment,” continued Rodney Spelvin, “I have had but one ambition—to somehow or other, cost what it might, get down into single figures.” He laughed bitterly. “You see,” he said, “I cannot even speak of this thing without splitting my infinitives. And, even as I split my infinitives, so did I split my drivers. After that first heavenly slosh I didn’t seem able to do anything right.”
He broke off, his face working. William cleared his throat awkwardly.
“Yes, but, dash it,” he said, “all this doesn’t explain why I find you alone with my sister in what I might call your lair.”
“The explanation is simple,” said Rodney Spelvin. “This sweet girl is the only person in the world who seems able to simply and intelligently and in a few easily understood words make clear the knack of the thing. There is none like her, none. I have been to pro after pro, but not one has been any good to me. I am a temperamental man, and there is a lack of sympathy and human understanding about these professionals which jars on my artist soul. They look at you as if you were a half-witted child. They click their tongues. They make odd Scotch noises. I could not endure the strain. And then this wonderful girl, to whom in a burst of emotion I had confided my unhappy case, offered to give me private lessons. So I went with her to some of those indoor practising places. But here, too, my sensibilities were racked by the fact that unsympathetic eyes observed me. So I fixed up a room here where we could be alone.”
“And, instead of going there,” said Anastatia, “we are wasting half the afternoon talking.”
William brooded for a while. He was not a quick thinker.
“Well, look here,” he said at length, “this is the point. This is the nub of the thing. This is where I want you to follow me very closely. Have you asked Anastatia to marry you?”
“Marry me?” Rodney gazed at him, shocked. “Have I asked her to marry me? I, who am not worthy to polish the blade of her niblick! I, who have not even a thirty handicap, ask a girl to marry me who was in the semifinal of last year’s Ladies’ Open! No, no, Bates, I may be a vers-libre poet, but I have some sense of what is fitting. I love her, yes. I love her with a fervour which causes me to frequently and for hours at a time lie tossing sleeplessly upon my pillow. But I would not dare to ask her to marry me.”
Anastatia burst into a peal of girlish laughter.
“You poor chump!” she cried. “Is that what has been the matter all this time? I couldn’t make out what
