“You mustn’t. Drive it down as hard as ever you can. Strength—or rather swiftness—tells; if your service is swift enough it is worth all the fancy cuts in the world. The Renshaws make half their points by volleying from the service-line, and the rest by swift service.”

“Swiftness is the word,” Betty returned gayly. “Anything more?”

“Get used to striking back-handed; don’t try to turn your thumb down; make a business of an out-and-out back-handed, wrong-side-of-the-racquet stroke.”

How sound all this advice was, tennis players may determine for themselves; but it certainly served its purpose well. Betty was a promising pupil. Morning, noon, and night she played, working with an assiduity which nearly fagged her cousin out.

“You are plucky, Betty,” he declared one day. “I’m afraid for my own laurels. And by the way, am I to be allowed to be present at this great tournament in which you are to cover yourself and your sex with glory?”

“Oh, yes; you are to challenge Mr. Granton if he beats me,—though he sha’n’t! Anybody can challenge the winner, you[115] know. That’s a provision I had put in myself to cover my own case.”

[115]

“Poor Granton!” George laughed. “Little does he dream of the awful humiliation in store for him.”

Betty set her lips together and nodded her head in a determined way.

“George,” she declared, with tragic earnestness, “if I get beaten I shall go straight home and die of—”

“Baffled stubbornness,” interpolated her cousin.

“Thwarted vengeance,” suggested Dora.

“No, of righteous indignation. Come, one set more before we drive back to Maugus. Only two days left, you know.”

IV.

The morning of the second day of the tournament dawned clear, and what was quite as much to the purpose, unusually cool. A little breeze from the northwest crept over the hills,—just enough to fan the heated players without disturbing the flight of the balls; while to make the weather perfect for tennis, by ten o’clock a light veil of clouds had comfortably covered the sun, cutting off all 

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