“Perhaps you'd like to play a round of golf, then?”      

       “Oh, yes, rather! I mean, no.” There it was again, that awful phrase. He was certain he had not intended to utter it. She must be thinking him a perfect lunatic. “I don't play golf.”      

       They stood looking at each other for a moment. It seemed to Roland that her gaze was partly contemptuous, partly pitying. He longed to tell her that, tho she had happened to pick on his weak points in the realm of sport, there were things he could do. An insane desire came upon him to babble about his school football team. Should he ask her to feel his quite respectable biceps? No.     

       “Never mind,” she said, kindly. “I daresay we shall think of something to amuse you.”      

       She held out her hand again. He took it in his for the briefest possible instant, painfully conscious the while that his own hand was clammy from the emotion through which he had been passing.     

       “Good night.”      

       “Good night.”      

       Thank Heaven, she was gone. That let him out for another twelve hours at least.     

       A quarter of an hour later found Roland still sitting, where she had left him, his head in his hands. The groan of an overwrought soul escaped him.     

       “I can't do it!”      

       He sprang to his feet.     

       “I won't do it.”      

       A smooth voice from behind him spoke.     

       “I think you are quite right, sir—if I may make the remark.”      

       Roland had hardly ever been so startled in his life. In the first place, he was not aware of having uttered his thoughts aloud; in the second, he had imagined that he was alone in the room. And so, a moment before, he had been.     

       But the owner of the voice possessed, among other qualities, the cat-like faculty of entering a room perfectly noiselessly—a fact which had won for him, in 

 Prev. P 68/76 next