Jeannie was standing on the first tee of the Wroxton golf links, doing what is technically known as addressing her ball. In other words, her driver was moving spasmodically backward and forward behind it, and she was thinking about her right foot. Some six yards behind her stood two impassive caddies, and Jack was standing opposite her ball and to the right of her.

“Don’t press,” he said, “and go back slowly. Let your left heel come off the ground quite naturally as the club goes back. Oh, keep your head still! Your spine is a pivot round which the arms work. And keep your eye on the ball.”

Jeannie’s club trailed very slowly back to about the level of her right shoulder, when suddenly an idea struck her, and she paused.

“Jack, how can I see my club head on the back swing out of my left eye if I am to look at the ball?” she asked.[291]

“If you are going to argue, stand at ease,” said Jack. “You will certainly miss the ball if you pause on the top of your swing. Let’s talk it out, and take your stroke afterward.”

Jeannie was looking fixedly at the ball.

“Don’t talk when I’m playing,” she said, and with a long breath raised her club a little higher. Then she hit furiously, and a frenzied ball hid itself in long grass some ten yards in front of the tee.

“I told you so,” she exclaimed.

“Have it again,” said Jack.

“No, certainly not,” said Jeannie. “Oh, yes; I think I will. I will start now. That was trial.”

“About the club head,” explained Jack, “it’s like this. You can see it, but you don’t look at it. You look at the ball, and at nothing else whatever. But do remember that you have to hit a part of the ball which you don’t see at all.”

Jeannie’s caddie had teed her ball again.

“Then what’s the use of looking at it?” she asked.

“In about five years, if you stick to it, you will understand,” he said.[292]

Jeannie shifted uneasily on her feet. Then another idea struck her.

“Then tell me that in five years’ time,” she said. “But for practical purposes, what am I to do this minute?”

There were already another couple waiting to start, one of which was Colonel Raymond. Jeannie saw him, and nothing in the world would have induced her to let him pass. Jack guessed as much.

“Hit this ball as hard as ever you can,” he said.

Jeannie shortened the intended swing, and threw her club at the ball. Oddly enough, it rose clear of the grass, towered, and fell a full hundred yards off, and getting a forward kick was like a bolted rabbit.

“I told you so,” she said again.

From behind came Cousin Robert’s voice.

“By gad!” he exclaimed loudly. But Jeannie did not turn round, and said negligently to Jack:

“Topped!”

Now, the ball was anything but topped, and Jack, struggling with inward laughter, sent a careless hooked drive down wind and[293] far. Then, as is natural at golf, the great silences of the game which isolates the player from the whole world closed round them and they went forward.

Thereafter came distress and difficulties. A bunker welcomed Jeannie’s second, and the bunker retained her third. A sky-sweeping iron shot was recorded as her fourth, and the fifth leaped across the green as if a wasp had stung it. Jack, meantime, had laid his second nearly dead, and four was sufficient.

“That sha’n’t count,” said Jeannie; “we’ll begin now. The handicap is as follows: We both play on till we reach the green, do you see, and then the scoring begins. We are like as we lie on the green, Jack, and after that you give me a stroke a hole. And I’ll play you for half a crown,” she added, with a burst of reckless speculation.

It was an afternoon of spring, a day of that exquisite temper seldom felt except in our much-maligned climate. April had laid aside its outbreaks of petulant rain, and wore the face of a laughing child. The great grave downs over which they played were scoured by a westerly wind, which swelled[294] the buds and smoothed out the creases in the little buttons of green which were bursting from the hawthorn. From the height an admirable expanse of big, wholesome country was visible on every side: to the west the houses of Wroxton stood red and glimmering in a hollow in the hills, and climbed the slopes of the circle. In the middle rose the gray Cathedral piercing the blue veil of pure air in which the lower houses were enveloped, and the tower was gilded with the sunshine. North and east lay a delectable land, where broad fields alternated with woods, round which hovered, like a green mist, the first outbreak of bursting leaves, and down the centre of the valley, unseen but traceable from a livelier flush of green, ran the river. To the south there were only downs, rising and falling in strong undulations like the muscles of strong arms interlaced. Overhead skylarks carolled unseen in the blue, or dropped, when their song was done, among the grass, breathless and drunken with music; the earth had renewed its lease of life, and the everlasting fountains of youth were unsealed again. Never since the seasons had[295] begun their courses was winter farther away, and never since Adam had walked with Eve in the garden had love touched two lives more closely than it touched Jeannie and Jack as they went over the breezy downs, club in hand.

The details of the play would not be interesting even to golfers, to others tedious; but it may be remarked that Jack drove long balls, which started low and rose inexplicably toward the end of their flight, and that a clean ball rising suddenly against a blue sky is invariably felt to be a stimulating object.

“It must be so nice,” remarked Jeannie, “if it doesn’t hurt to be a golf ball. You lie there seeing nothing except blades of grass close round you, and then suddenly the ground races away from you, and you rise, rise, like that one did, over a bank and a road, and drop on the smooth short grass of the green.”

“The hole must be unpleasant,” said Jack. “You go trotting over the green, and then suddenly tumble into a horrible, small, dark prison, with iron at the bottom.[296]”

“Yes, and somebody says ‘Good shot!’ but they take you out again. Oh, Jack, may I take off my hat?”

All mankind may be divided into those who like hats and those who do not. Some people habitually wear a hat unless there is a real reason, like a church or royalty, for taking it off, but to others a hat is to be always discarded if possible. Both Jeannie and the other were habitually hatless folk, a characteristic which goes hand-in-hand with a love for wind and large open places, and is borne out, to endless issues, in the normal attitude of the mind toward problems of life.

She gave it to her caddie to carry for her, and shook her head to free it of its prison-house shades.

“That is better,” she said. “Now my drives will go ten yards farther.”

Colonel Raymond, meantime, playing behind them, was lavish of advice to his opponent.

“Cultivate a style,” he said. “Hew out a style for yourself, and the rest will follow. Ah!”—and he watched his own ball, which he had topped heavily with his mashie, skip[297] and bump over the outlying banks of a bunker and roll up gently to the hole.

“A useful stroke that,” said this incomparable man. “I picked it up from poor young Tom Morris. Time and again have I seen him skim his ball over the rough stuff and lay it dead. A fine, useful shot.”

Useful the shot undoubtedly was, and certainly there was no showiness about it, a quality which Colonel Raymond detested.

“You’ve got to get into the hole,” was his maxim. “Well, get there,” and he missed his putt.

Colonel Raymond, on his return to Wroxton after the recovery of Maria, had been at first a little disconcerted to find that the engagement of Cousin Jeannie was common property. Mrs. Raymond, no doubt, would have mentioned it in her letters to him, but the Colonel had begged her not to write at all.

“The other children will be with me,” he had said, “and a letter may so easily carry infection. Why, there was a man in India who got the cholera simply through a letter. So don’t write, Constance. Send me a telegram every day or two to say how Maria is,[298] and don’t fret yourself. Worry and fright, as Cousin Jeannie said, are to be avoided.”

But almost before the first shock of the news had conveyed itself to the Colonel, he saw his ingenious way out of it.

“Didn’t I say they were engaged all along?” he roared to his old cronies. “I remember nearly letting it out one evening here. It was intended, as I said, not to be known at once, and I kept my counsel. But I remember letting it slip once at Miss Clifford’s. Ask her if it is not so. I knew all along, all along. Is that your lead, partner? A devilish poor one.”

As soon as the year’s mourning for Jeannie’s father was over the marriage was to take place—that is to say, they would not be married till June. Never had a courtship run more smoothly, and never did the course of true love behave less proverbially.

Canon Collingwood took the engagement as he took most things in life, with placid enjoyment, but the event had moved Mrs. Collingwood beyond the run of worldly matters. Like the rest of Wroxton, every time she had been brought in contact with Jeannie she[299] had been moved to something warmer than mere liking, even when she disagreed with her, at the charm and simplicity of the girl. There were some people, like herself, who did many unselfish things from a sense of duty; Jeannie, on the other hand, seemed to do them from inclination, and her sense of duty was as invisible as the string which binds together a pearl necklace. All that could be seen were the series of beautiful shining acts; what made the series was left to conjecture. Mrs. Colli............