er
agonies. I knew that, if I scraped through by the smallest possible
margin, his appetite would be destroyed, his sleep o' nights broken. He
would wake from fitful slumber moaning that if he had only used his
iron instead of his mashie at the tenth, all would have been well;
that, if he had putted more carefully on the seventh green, life would
not be drear and blank; that a more judicious manipulation of his
brassey throughout might have given him something to live for. All
these things I knew.

And they did not touch me. I was adamant. The professor was waiting for
me at the Club House, and greeted me with a cold and stately
inclination of the head.

"Beautiful day for golf," I observed in my gay, chatty manner. He bowed
in silence.

"Very well," I thought. "Wait. Just wait."

"Miss Derrick is well, I hope?" I added, aloud.

That drew him. He started. His aspect became doubly forbidding.

"Miss Derrick is perfectly well, sir, I thank you."

"And you? No bad effect, I hope, from your dip yesterday?"

"Mr. Garnet, I came here for golf, not conversation," he said.

We made it so. I drove off from the first tee. It was a splendid drive.
I should not say so if there were any one else to say so for me.
Modesty would forbid. But, as there is no one, I must repeat the
statement. It was one of the best drives of my experience. The ball
flashed through the air, took the bunker with a dozen feet to spare,
and rolled on to the green. I had felt all along that I should be in
form. Unless my opponent was equally above himself, he was a lost man.
I could toy with him.

The excellence of my drive had not been without its effect on the
professor. I could see that he was not confident. He addressed his ball
more strangely and at greater length than any one I had ever seen. He
waggled his club over it as if he were going to perform a conjuring
trick. Then he struck, and topped it.

The ball rolled two yards.

He looked at it in silence. Then he looked at me--also in silence.

I was gazing seawards.

When I looked round he was getting to work with a brassey.

This time he hit the bunker, and rolled back. He repeated this
manoeuvre twice.

"Hard luck!" I murmured sympathetically on the third occasion, thereby
going as near to being slain with a niblick as it has ever been my lot
to go. Your true golfer is easily roused in times of misfortune; and
there was a red gleam in the eye of the professor turned to me.

"I