Now, when a man feels like that, it is impossible to restrain him long. For a week Mortimer Sturgis’s soul sizzled within him: then he could contain himself no longer. One night, at one of the informal dances at the hotel, he drew the girl out on to the moonlit terrace.
“Miss Somerset—” he began, stuttering with emotion like an imperfectly-corked bottle of ginger-beer. “Miss Somerset—may I call you Mary?”
The girl looked at him with eyes that shone softly in the dim light.
“Mary?” she repeated. “Why, of course, if you like—”
“If I like!” cried Mortimer. “Don’t you know that it is my dearest wish? Don’t you know that I would rather be permitted to call you Mary than do the first hole at Muirfield in two? Oh, Mary, how I have longed for this moment! I love you! I love you! Ever since I met you I have known that you were the one girl in this vast world whom I would die to win! Mary, will you be mine? Shall we go round together? Will you fix up a match with me on the links of life which shall end only when the Grim Reaper lays us both a stymie?”
She drooped towards him.
“Mortimer!” she murmured.
He held out his arms, then drew back. His face had grown suddenly tense, and there were lines of pain about his mouth.
“Wait!” he said, in a strained voice. “Mary, I love you dearly, and because I love you so dearly I cannot let you trust your sweet life to me blindly. I have a confession to make, I am not—I have not always been”—he paused—“a good man,” he said, in a low voice.
She started indignantly.
“How can you say that? You are the best, the kindest, the bravest man I have ever met! Who but a good man would have risked his life to save me from drowning?”
“Drowning?” Mortimer’s voice seemed perplexed. “You? What do you mean?”
“Have you forgotten the time when I fell in the sea last week, and you jumped in with all your clothes on—”
“Of course, yes,” said Mortimer. “I remember now. It was the day I did the long seventh in five. I got off a good tee-shot straight down the fairway, took a baffy for my second, and—But that is not the point. It is sweet and generous of you to think so highly of what was the merest commonplace act of ordinary politeness, but I must repeat, that judged by the standards of your snowy purity, I am not a good man. I do not come to you clean and spotless as a young girl should expect her husband to come to her. Once, playing in a foursome, my ball fell in some long grass. Nobody was near me. We had no caddies, and the others were on the fairway. God knows—” His voice shook. “God knows I struggled against the temptation. But I fell. I kicked the ball on to a little bare mound, from which it was an easy task with a nice half-mashie to reach the green for a snappy seven. Mary, there have been times when, going round by myself, I have allowed myself ten-foot putts on three holes in succession, simply in order to be able to say I had done the course in under a hundred. Ah! you shrink from me! You are disgusted!”
“I’m not disgusted! And I don’t shrink! I only shivered because it is rather cold.”
“Then you can love me in spite of my past?”
“Mortimer!”
She fell into his arms.
“My dearest,” he said presently, “what a happy life ours will be. That is, if you do not find that you have made a mistake.”
“A mistake!” she cried, scornfully.
“Well, my handicap is twelve, you know, and not so darned twelve at that. There are days when I play my second from the fairway of the next hole but one, days when I couldn’t putt into a coal-hole with ‘Welcome!’ written over it. And you are a Ladies’ Open Champion. Still, if you think it’s all right—. Oh, Mary, you little know how I have dreamed of some day marrying a really first-class golfer! Yes, that was my vision—of walking up the aisle with some sweet plus two girl on my arm. You shivered again. You are catching cold.”
“It is a little cold,” said the girl. She spoke in a small voice.
“Let me take you in, sweetheart,” said Mortimer. “I’ll just put you in a comfortable chair with a nice cup of coffee, and then I think I really must come out again and tramp about and think how perfectly splendid everything is.”
They were married a few weeks later, very quietly, in the little village church of Saint Brule.
