Harry Spencer had been travelling nearly three years. Naturally, he found some changes and some new faces at Westfield. Concerning the former he was becomingly appreciative. He promptly ranged himself on the side of progress, admired the new club-house and the new establishments in the neighborhood, and evinced a willingness to take an active part in the enlarged energies of the club. During his peregrinations in foreign lands he had visited the St. Andrew's golf links, and he had views regarding bunkers and other features of the game which he was prepared to advocate. When he had left home the bicycle was all the rage, and some portion of his journeyings had been on an up-to-date machine. But he found now that the fashionable portion of the community had dropped this craze, and that to ride a "wheel" was beginning to be considered a bore except as a means of getting from one place to another. The fever of golf was rampant instead, and had reached the stage where its votaries were almost delirious in their devotion, notably the people most unfitted to play the game, and who had taken it up in order to be in fashion. During the spring and summer following his return the improved links at Westfield was crowded with players of every grade whose proficiency was generally in reverse proportion to the number of clubs they carried.

Soon after the season had fairly opened and the greens were in good order the lately returned wanderer found himself one morning engaged in giving a lesson in the royal and ancient game to Miss Peggy Blake, who had a severe attack of the disease and promised to be a proficient pupil, for Dobson, the professional at the Hunt Club, had declared that she had a free swing and could follow through as well as most men. The trouble at the moment was that, after taking a free swing, she either failed to hit the ball altogether or hit it off at some distressing angle. As she explained volubly to everybody, until within a week she had been making screaming brassie shots which carried a hundred and fifty yards, but had suddenly lost her game completely. Harry had kindly offered himself as a coach, a delightful proposition to the blithe young woman, especially as Dobson was engaged for the time being in superintending the primary and elephantine efforts of Miss Ella Marbury, the stout maiden sister of Wagner Marbury, the Western multi-millionnaire and proprietor of one of the new neighboring palaces so obnoxious to Mrs. Cunningham. Miss Peggy was more than pleased to have for an hour or two the uninterrupted companionship of this good-looking and redoubtable gallant, whose attentions were to be regarded as a feather in her cap, and who would doubtless be able to tell her what she was doing wrong.

Hers was one of the new faces, and Harry had given his following to understand that he admired her spirited and comely personality. "Miss West Wind" he had christened her genially, and the epithet had spread with the rumor that he had noticed her. Yet it was tacitly understood that he had no intention of interfering with the suit of his friend Guy Perry, who was supposed to be well in the lead of the other pursuers of the breezy maiden. Yet, though he sought to give the impression that his favor in this case was merely an artistic tribute and that he still walked scatheless in the world of women, he was glad of an opportunity to stroll over the links in her society. She would entertain him. Besides, she was a fluent talker, and he could count on her retailing for his edification more or less of the current history of Westfield written between the lines, which was only to be picked up gradually by one who had been prevented by absence from personal observation.

It was a very simple matter to detect the trouble with his companion's stroke.

"You don't keep your eye on the ball, Miss Blake. That's the whole trouble with you. Anyone can see that."

Peggy looked incredulous. "If there is one special thing more than another which I try to bear constantly in mind, it is to keep my eye on the ball. Do I really take it off, Mr. Spencer? Of course you must know. There are so many other things to remember, but I did think I was completely disciplined on that point. Watch me now."

Thereupon she proceeded to execute a dashing stroke, her evident standard being to carry her club through with such velocity as to bring the head round her left shoulder and cause her to execute a pirouette like the pictures of the golfing girls in the magazines. The ball flew off at a tangent and narrowly missed her own caddy.

"How rotten!" she murmured. "I had both my eyes glued on the ball, and you see what happened. And only a week ago I was driving like a streak." Her expletive was merely the popular phrase of the day by which golden youth of both sexes was apt to express even trivial dissatisfaction.

She was a pathetic figure of distress. Her exertions had heightened her color so that it suggested the poppy rather than the rose, and was not unlike the hue of her trig golfing garment. She swept back a stray ringlet which had escaped from under her hat. "You see I have lost my game utterly, Mr. Spencer."

Harry laughed. "You were looking at me out of the corners of your eyes that time. Lower your lids until you exaggerate the modest maiden and don't move your head." It was a half-deferential, half-sardonic voice with a caressing touch, indicating temporary devotion to the subject-matter in hand which was flattering. "Swing more easily," he added, "and don't try to rival the Gibson girl until you recover confidence." Then he corrected slightly her stance and the position of her hands—all with a deft yet bantering grace of manner which soothed and attracted her. He went through the correct motions of the stroke for her enlightenment, and as he stood erect and supple Peggy did not forbear to reflect that he was very handsome. How dark his hair and eyes were! It was a bold sort of beauty, and, though he wore neither mustache nor beard, the faintly bluish tinge of his complexion betrayed that, but for the barber, he would have been what Mrs. Herbert Cole might have termed an incarnate symphony in black. He appeared harmoniously muscular. He executed the necessary movements with lithe, nervous energy, focusing his attention tensely for the brief occasion. The moment he lowered his club he regained his leisurely and rather indolent demeanor.

His pupil essayed to follow his instructions. At the third attempt the ball sailed straight as an arrow to a moderate distance, which comforted the performer, but she felt too nervously excited to exult. It might be only an accident.

"Try again," he said confidentially. "You've almost got it."

Once more the ball shot correctly from the club. Harry stooped and placed another on the tee. Peggy swung, then followed through with a little of her old elasticity. It flew like a rifle bullet low and long across the distant bunker.

She rose on the tips of her toes as she followed its entrancing flight. "I've got back my game," she cried jubilantly. "You've saved my life, Mr. Spencer." She looked as though she would have been glad, had convention permitted, to throw her arms around her benefactor's neck. And to the true golfer it would not seem an exaggerated reward. "I've been in the slough of despond for nearly a week, and playing worse every day. Now I'm in the seventh heaven, and it's all your doing."

He acknowledged the exuberant gratitude with a graceful mock heroic bow. "I shall consider my terms. The charge should be considerable."

Just then by the sheerest chance a white carnation which Peggy was wearing at her throat became detached from her dress and fell to the ground. He picked it up, and, holding it before him and looking into her eyes, said with melodious assurance:

"I will keep this, if I may, as my tuition fee."

Peggy looked embarrassed and let fall her eyes, albeit not easily disconcerted. The carnation was one from a bunch which Guy Perry had sent her the day before, and to hand it over seemed almost an act of treason, though they were not yet actually engaged. Yet she was conscious that she thought this new acquaintance charming. Silence gives consent where lovely woman is concerned. At any rate, when she looked up he was in the act of placing it in his buttonhole. But his fingers had paused in their work as a consequence of his arrested glance. A feminine figure outlined on the crest of adjacent rising ground had suddenly caught his eye. She was addressing her ball for a brassie shot, and as he gazed it was performed with a sweeping grace of which the lack of effort was the salient charm.

Peggy, whose eyes had promptly followed the direction of his, vouchsafed the desired information.

"Mrs. Herbert Maxwell."

"Really!" There was a shade of interest in the monosyllable, as though the identity of some one whom he had been rather curious to meet had been revealed to him.

"You haven't met her?"

"Not yet."

"Oh, you'd like her immensely."

The words were uttered with such naive confidence that Harry Spencer turned away his gaze from the new attraction to survey the old.

"How do you know?" he inquired jauntily.

Peggy spluttered a little at this flank attack. "Oh, well, you know, she's so awfully clever. She's different. She'd pique your curiosity anyway," she concluded, recovering her aplomb.

"Am I so difficult to please?" he asked sententiously. He answered the question himself. "Yes, I admit that I am." His look of admiration, which Peggy divined was constitutional with him on such occasions, was best to be met by diversion.

"I shall never be able to play golf as Lydia Maxwell does, and I've been at it twice as long. She has only played this spring, and Dobson says that she has a better idea of the game than any other woman. It's just knack with her, for her balls go farther than mine and yet she makes scarcely an exertion. You couldn't help admire her in all sorts of ways. It has been a dreadfully quiet season for her, though, for when her baby was six weeks old and she had sent out cards for two musical parties in their new town house, her husband's mother, old Mrs. Maxwell, died suddenly, and she had to go into mourning. So they went to Southern California for February and March, and moved down here as soon as they returned. She took lessons in golf at Los Angeles, and she beat me four up the first time we played, even though I supposed I could give her half a stroke."

While he listened to this monologue, Spencer followed the progress of the subject of it. She was playing with pretty Mrs. Baxter, but, though her opponent was an ordinarily graceful woman, there was a deft harmony in her movements which made Mrs. Baxter appear an unfinished person by comparison.

"They say the real secret is that she has an artistic temperament." The speech was Peggy's by way of reading his thoughts and providing a condensed and comprehensive key.

"And her husband—what is he like? You know he has come to the surface during my absence."

"He hasn't it at all—I mean an artistic temperament. But he's an awfully good sort—awfully; a true sport, and kind as can be." Peggy's vocabulary of enthusiasm, though fundamentally native, sometimes made reprisals on the kindred jargon of Great Britain.

"I see. And you infer that I have an artistic temperament?" A tendency toward challenging unexpectedness was one of Spencer's prime manifestations with women.

Peggy looked embarrassed. She had not bargained for such an unequivocal piece of teasing. She put up her hand to her head to secure her escaping comb. "I don't know you very well, of course, but I had supposed so. Yet I'm not clever, and I dote on Lydia," she added archly.

Harry Spencer did not have to go out of his way for an opportunity to satisfy his curiosity by personal acquaintance with Mrs. Herbert Maxwell. When he and his fair partner had finished the last hole and approached the piazza of the new club-house, they found her sitting there—one of a group of both sexes waiting for luncheon. Peggy, radiant and prodigal of superlatives, proclaimed to one after another that her game had come back. Wasn't it perfectly glorious?—the loveliest thing which had ever happened. And Mr. Spencer had detected at once what was wrong. "Just think of it, I was pressing and took my eye off the ball," she kept reiterating, "and I never knew it. Wasn't it dear of him?"

One of the most characteristic features of golf is that it is not an altruistic pastime. Everyone is feverishly absorbed by the state of his own game, and does not care at heart a picayune for his neighbor's. At the moment of Peggy's vociferous advent the assembled company were talking in pairs, and each member of each pair was endeavoring to excite the interest of his or her partner in the dialogue by glowing or dejected narration of why his or her score was lower or higher than the speaker's average. In some cases both were talking at once and neither listened. Oftener, perhaps, each had asserted an innings, and the strongest or most persistent lungs held the mastery. Miss Marbury, who under the tutelage of Dobson had done the longest hole in 12 and the eighteen holes in 132—five better than ever before—was bubbling over with ecstasy and soliciting congratulations. Douglas Hale, who had failed by one stroke to surpass his previous record of 82, was telling hoarsely and pathetically to everyone whom he could buttonhole how it happened.

"At the fourteenth hole I was on the green in two and took seven for the hole. Seven! Just think of that, seven! Five strokes on the green." As he uttered the words with excruciating precision, he would hold up the five fingers of his hand and shake them at his auditor. It was an experience which would last him all day and as far into the evening as he could find new listeners, especially if he could endeavor to take the edge off his disappointment by Scotch and soda.

Consequently, though everybody heard that Miss Peggy Blake had recovered her game, and her breezy invasion caused a stir, the fact that she had done so was of interest only because of the means by which this had been brought to pass. It was Harry Spencer, not she, who became the cynosure of numerous feminine eyes. If he had put Peggy onto her game, why not them onto theirs? Peggy, mistaking the reason for the pause in the general chatter for interest in her improvement, proceeded to rehearse gleefully the details of her triumph for the benefit of the company. But Douglas Hale, in no mood to be side-tracked by any such interruption, stepped forward, and hooking his arm in Harry Spencer's, led him apart with a mysterious "A word with you, old man."

Having thus enforced an audience, he held forth in the low tone appropriate to an interesting confidence. "Just now I was 58 at the end of the thirteenth hole, and was on the green of the fourteenth in two, and I took seven for the hole. Five puts on the green! Think of that, five!" he whispered hoarsely, and shook his five fingers in Harry's face. "Seven for the hole. And I finished in 82. Tied my own record. Wasn't that the meanest streak of luck a man ever had? Five puts, and two of them rimmed the cup."

His victim listened indulgently. The firm grip on his arm precluded escape.

"You must learn to put, my dear fellow."

"That's the most sickening part of it. I made every other put. Let me tell you—you remember the slope of the fourteenth green? Well, I——"

Realizing what he was in for, Harry took advantage of a momentary pause on the part of his torturer for the purpose of lighting a cigarette. His observing eyes had noticed that Mrs. Maxwell was standing apart from the other women who were within range of Miss Blake's jubilant reiteration. He wrenched himself free from Douglas's clutch.

"It was a case of downright hard luck, and now, in return for my heart-felt sympathy and for listening to your tale of woe, introduce me to Mrs. Herbert Maxwell."

Puffing at his half-lighted cigarette, Douglas Hale reached out to recover his lost grip. "Wait a minute. You haven't heard half. I will show you just how it happened."

Spencer intercepted the reaching fingers and grabbed the offender's wrist, and said, with jocund firmness, "I don't care a tinker's dam how it happened, Douglas, and I tell you you can't put. Introduce me to Mrs. Maxwell."

This quip caused the egotist to draw himself up stiffly. He was proof against hints and ordinary recalcitration, but such an unmistakable rebuff was not to be ignored; that is, he could not with proper self-respect continue the harangue on which he was bent.

"Of course if you don't care to hear how it happened, I won't tell you." So saying, Douglas suffered himself to be conveyed the necessary few steps, and performed the ceremony of introduction.

Lydia let her eyes rest with keen but interested scrutiny on this new-comer. He was a boon at the moment, for she had taken the gauge of everybody at Westfield, and was conscious that neither her heart nor her brain was satisfied. She craved novelty and true aesthetic appreciation. Did anyone really understand her? Not even Fannie Cole, who came the nearest to divining her hatred of the commonplace and her dread of being bored. But Fannie, though discerning, chose to remain a slave to the canons of conformity. That morning, in her looking-glass she had asked herself the question, "Why did I ever marry Herbert Maxwell?" But she had asked it with no malice aforethought, merely as one who, with leisure to take account of stock, foots up his assets and puts the question, "Am I solvent?" The interrogation was simply searching and contemplative. The answer had been prompt, and in a measure assuring. "Because it gave me everything I need." Yet, somehow, there remained a cloud upon her spirit. Was this all? Did life offer nothing further?

"We make a fuss and circumstance about our sports," she said.

"They do creak."

It was agreeable to be comprehended so promptly. "It isn't sport for sport's sake, but for the sake of the cups and because it's the thing."

"And above all to beat the other fellow. That's the national creed. It's so in everything—competition. We are brought up from childhood to consider that winning is the thing which counts. We must win at any cost at foot-ball or trade, in affairs or in love."

She made one of her little pauses. Decidedly he was a kindred spirit and to be cultivated. "I am an exotic then."

"How so?"

"Competition—the national creed—does not interest me."

"Because you win so easily. I watched you play this morning. You will have no rival of your own sex here."

She ignored the tribute; she knew that already; it was the thesis which interested her.

"It bores me—winning, I mean. Golf, for the time being, is a delight."

He gave her a pirate glance, as though to search her soul, and uttered one of his bold sallies:

"That is, your doll is stuffed with——"

She checked him, shaking her head. "Oh, no. That is, I think not. I have never cut her open. I had in mind something quite different." Her dainty face grew pensive as she sought the exact phrase to interpret her psychology. "I have never had to struggle for anything. It has always come to me."

"Exactly." His note of emphasis reminded her that her words were, after all, merely an indirect echo of his diagnosis. "But your time is sure to come," he asserted confidently.

The smile of incredulity which curved her lips betrayed entertainment also. "In what field?" she inquired.

Spencer shrugged his shoulders. "I am a student of character, not a soothsayer."

"And then?" she queried.

"You will be like the rest of us—only more so. You could not bear to lose at any cost."

What might have seemed effrontery in some men was but a piquant challenge in his mouth, so speciously was it uttered. Lydia was not unaccustomed to men whose current coin was sardonic sallies, as witness the veteran Gerald Marcy. But this was something different. Her soul had been suddenly pitchforked by a professor of anatomy and held up under her nose with the caveat that she was ignorant of the mainsprings of her own behavior. It was impudence, but novel, and she forgave it with the reflection that he would live to eat his gratuitous deductions, which would be the neatest form of vengeance.

The smile of incredulity which curved her lips betrayed entertainment also.

---