Harry Belfield was the least bit vexed—amusedly vexed. He remembered Andy's clumsy elephantine sprawlings (no other word for them) about the court when in their boyhood he had first undertaken to teach him the game. Andy must have played a lot in Canada.
"Now I'll take three off you, Andy," he cried, and served a double fault. The "gallery" laughed. "Oh, damn it!" exclaimed Harry, indecorously loud, and served another. Andy could not help laughing—the first time he had ever laughed at Harry Belfield. Given a handicap of thirty, the game was, barring extraordinary accidents, his. So it proved. He won it at forty-fifteen, with a stroke that a child ought to have returned; Harry put it into the net.
"Lost your nerve, Harry?" said the umpire.
"The beggar's such a sticker!" grumbled Harry, laughing. "You think you've got him licked—and you haven't!"
"I'm glad Mr. Hayes won." This from Vivien.
"Not only defeated, but forsaken!" Harry cried. "Andy, I'll have your blood!"
Andy Hayes laughed joyously. This victory came as an unlooked-for adornment to a day already notable. A Saturday half-holiday, down from town in time to lunch at Nutley, tennis and tea, and the prospect (not free from piquant alarm) of dinner at Halton—this was a day for Andy Hayes! With an honest vanity—a vanity based on true affection—he thought how the account of it would tickle Jack Rock. His life seemed broadening out before him, and he would like to tell dear old Jack all about it. Playing lawn-tennis at Nutley, dining at Halton—here were things just as delightful, just as enlightening, as supping at the great restaurant in the company of the Nun and pretty sardonic Miss Dutton. He owed them all to Harry—he almost wished he had lost the set. At any rate he felt that he ought to wish it.
"It was an awful fluke!" he protested apologetically.
"You'd beat him three times out of five," Wellgood asserted in that confident tone of his.
Harry looked a little vexed. He bore an occasional defeat with admirable good-nature: to be judged consistently inferior was harder schooling to his temper. Triumphing in whatever the contest might be had grown into something of a custom with him. It brooked occasional breaches: abrogation was another matter. But "Oh no!" cried both the girls together.