“Surely you can’t hold us responsible?  The child’s parents ...”

“I don’t mean that, you ass.  Here we have the innocent public putting its money on our play, and we’re treating the whole thing as a joke.  This has got to be a match, after all.  A woman’s fortune hangs upon the issue—­doesn’t it, Lucy?”

“Yes, Sir,” she answered without comprehension.

From this point the game became a grim struggle.  I won the third hole in seventeen, but Haynes took the fourth in nineteen to my twenty-two.

At the fifth I noticed a pond guarding the green.  I carefully circumvented this with my faithful putter and holed out in my smallest score of the round so far.

“Hi!” shouted Haynes.  “How many?” He had been having a little hockey practice by himself in the rough, and was now preparing to play an approach shot across the pond.

“Twelve!”

“Then I’ve this for the hole,” he yelled, and topped his ball gently into the water ...

So it went on—­what the papers call a ding-dong struggle.  Suffice it to say that at the twelfth I was dormy one and in a state of partial collapse.

The thirteenth is a short hole.  You drive from a kind of pulpit, and the green is below you, protected by large stiff-backed bunkers like pews.

“Last hole, thank Heaven,” panted Haynes.  “I couldn’t bear much more.  I’m all of a dither as it is.”

Mabel, twittering with excitement, teed up.  I looked at the green lying invitingly below and took that gigantic putter.  The ball, struck with all my little remaining strength, flew straight towards the biggest bunker, scored a direct hit on the top of it, bounced high in the air—­and trickled on to the green.

Haynes invoked the Deity (even at that stressful moment, to his eternal credit, in French) and took his miniature driver.  His ball, hit much too hard, pitched in the same bunker, crossed it, climbed up the face of it, and joined mine on the green.  Utterly unnerved, we toddled down and took our putts.  Haynes, through sheer luck (as he admits), laid his ball stone dead; I had a brain-storm and over-ran the hole, leaving myself a thirty-foot putt for the match.  I took long and careful aim, but my hands were shaking pitifully.  The ball started on a grotesquely wrong line, turned on a rise in the ground, cannoned off a worm-cast and plopped into the tin.  Mabel gave a shriek of joy, and Lucy—­well, I regret to say that Lucy made use of a terse expression the French equivalent of which her employer had been at great pains to remember.  Haynes and I lay flat on the ground, overcome as much by emotion as by our physical weakness.

At last I struggled to a sitting posture.

“Mabel,” I croaked, “I shall want at least ten per cent. commission for that.  How much have you won?”

“Please, Sir,” she cooed happily, “a ’a’p’ny, Sir.”

* * * * *