“Is Clarence Breckenridge playing to-day, I wonder?  Anybody seen him?”

“Must be,” said the more definite of the two rather indefinite girls, with an assumption of bright interest.  Leila Buckney, a few weeks ago, had announced her engagement to the mild-looking blond young man, Parker Hoyt, and she was just now attempting to hold him by a charm she suspected she did not possess for him, and at the same time to give her mother and sister the impression that Parker was so deeply in her toils that she need make no further effort to enslave him.

She had really nothing in common with Parker; their conversation was composed entirely of personalities about their various friends, and Leila felt it a great burden, and dreaded the hours she must perforce spend alone with her future husband.  It would be much better when they were married, of course, but they could not even begin to talk wedding plans yet, because Parker lived in nervous terror of his aunt’s disapproval, and Mrs. Watts Frothingham was just now in Europe, and had not yet seen fit to answer her nephew’s dignified notification of his new plans, or the dutiful and gracious note with which Miss Leila had accompanied it.

The truth, though Leila did not know it, was that Mrs. Frothingham had a pretty social secretary named Margaret Clay, a strange, attractive little person, eighteen years old, whose mother had been the old lady’s companion for many years.  And to Magsie, as they all called her, young Mr. Hoyt had paid some decided attention not many months before.  Mrs. Frothingham had seen fit to disapprove these advances then, but she was an extraordinarily erratic and cross-grained old lady, and her silence now had forced her nephew uncomfortably to suspect that she might have changed her mind.

“Darn it!” said the engaging youth to himself “It’s none of her business, anyway, what I do!” But it made him acutely uneasy none the less.  He was the possessor of a good income, as he stood there, this mild little blond; it came to him steadily and regularly, with no effort at all on his part, but, with his aunt’s million—­it must be at least that—­he felt that he would have been much happier.  There it was, safe in the family, and she was seventy-six, and without a direct heir.  It would be too bad to miss it now!

He thought of it a great deal, was thinking of it this moment, in fact, and Leila suspected that he was.  But Mrs. Buckney, aside from a half-formed wish that young persons were more demonstrative in these days, and that the wedding might be soon, had not a care in the world, and, after a moment’s unresponsive silence, returned blithely to her query about Clarence Breckenridge.

“I haven’t seen him,” responded one of her daughters presently.  “Funny, too!  Last year he didn’t miss a day.”

“Of course he’ll get the cup as usual, this year,” Mrs. Buckney said brightly.  “But I don’t suppose young people with their heads full of wedding plans will care much about the golf!” she added courageously.