Colonel Raymond, meantime, playing behind them, was lavish of advice to his opponent.
“Cultivate a style,” he said. “Hew out a style for yourself, and the rest will follow. Ah!”—and he watched his own ball, which he had topped heavily with his mashie, skip and bump over the outlying banks of a bunker and roll up gently to the hole.
“A useful stroke that,” said this incomparable man. “I picked it up from poor young Tom Morris. Time and again have I seen him skim his ball over the rough stuff and lay it dead. A fine, useful shot.”
Useful the shot undoubtedly was, and certainly there was no showiness about it, a quality which Colonel Raymond detested.
“You’ve got to get into the hole,” was his maxim. “Well, get there,” and he missed his putt.
Colonel Raymond, on his return to Wroxton after the recovery of Maria, had been at first a little disconcerted to find that the engagement of Cousin Jeannie was common property. Mrs. Raymond, no doubt, would have mentioned it in her letters to him, but the Colonel had begged her not to write at all.
“The other children will be with me,” he had said, “and a letter may so easily carry infection. Why, there was a man in India who got the cholera simply through a letter. So don’t write, Constance. Send me a telegram every day or two to say how Maria is, and don’t fret yourself. Worry and fright, as Cousin Jeannie said, are to be avoided.”
But almost before the first shock of the news had conveyed itself to the Colonel, he saw his ingenious way out of it.
“Didn’t I say they were engaged all along?” he roared to his old cronies. “I remember nearly letting it out one evening here. It was intended, as I said, not to be known at once, and I kept my counsel. But I remember letting it slip once at Miss Clifford’s. Ask her if it is not so. I knew all along, all along. Is that your lead, partner? A devilish poor one.”
As soon as the year’s mourning for Jeannie’s father was over the marriage was to take place—that is to say, they would not be married till June. Never had a courtship run more smoothly, and never did the course of true love behave less proverbially.