id Marshall. "Who told you that
Miss Grace Harding is coming to Woodvale?"

"Carter told me," replied Chilvers. "Carter knows them. The whole
Harding family is coming, which includes Croesus, his wife, and their
fair daughter, aged nineteen or thereabouts. Ah! why did I marry so
soon?"

Mrs. Chilvers was standing back of him and soundly boxed his ears.

"How does it happen that the Hardings are coming here?" asked Mrs.
Chilvers, when told the cause of this excitement. "Are they Mr. Carter's
guests?"

"Mr. Harding is a charter member of Woodvale," I informed her. "For
some unknown reason he joined the club when it started, but has never
been here, and I doubt if he has ever played golf. He is the owner of
the majority of the bonds issued against this clubhouse."

"I wonder if Miss Harding plays golf?" said Boyd.

"Golf is not among the list of accomplishments mentioned by those
writers who pretend to know all about her," remarked Chilvers. "I have
been forced to learn from a casual reading of society events that this
remarkable heiress is without an equal as an equestrienne, that she
paints, sings, drives a sixty-horse-power Mercedes with a skill and a
courage which discourages the French chauffeurs, and does other athletic
and artistic feats, but I have yet to learn that she golfs."

"I presume," I said, "that she will take up the game, and also the turf.
The three Hardings doubtless will form one of those delightful family
parties which add so much to the merriment of a golf course. I can shut
my eyes and see them hacking their way around the links; the daughter
pretty and more anxious to show off the latest Parisian golfing costumes
than to replace a divot; the father determined, perspiring, and red of
face, and the mother stout and always in the way."

"Isn't Mr. Smith the incorrigible woman-hater?" exclaimed Mrs. Chilvers.
"You did not talk that way before you became so infatuated with golf,
Mr. Smith."

"I am not a woman-hater," I protested, "but I--I don't like to----"

"Some day Smith will meet a fair creature on the golf links and lose his
drive and his heart at the same time," declared Chilvers. "That was the
way I was tripped up and carried into bondage," he added, his hand
wandering to his wife's waist.

"With the exception of Mrs. Chilvers," I said, and I came very near
making no exceptions, Miss Ross and Miss Dangerfield having left
us--"with the exception of Mrs. Chilvers, I have yet to see th