“I understand you,” Felix remarked, nodding his head. “America is certainly one of the last places one would have dreamed of looking for you. You will find it, I am afraid, politically unborn; your own little methods, at any rate, would scarcely achieve popularity there. Further, its sympathies, of course, are with democratic France. I can imagine that you and the President of the United States would represent opposite poles of thought. Yet there were two considerations which weighed with me.”
“This is very interesting,” Mr. Sabin remarked. “May I know what they were? To be permitted a glimpse into the inward workings of a brain like yours is indeed a privilege!”
Felix bowed with a gratified smile upon his lips. The satire of Mr. Sabin’s dry tone was apparently lost upon him.
“You are most perfectly welcome,” he declared. “In the first place I said to myself that Kamtchatka and Greenland, although equally interesting to you, would be quite unable to afford themselves the luxury of offering you an asylum. You must seek the shelter of a great and powerful country, and one which you had never offended, and save America, there is none such in the world. Secondly, you are a Sybarite, and you do not without very serious reasons place yourself outside the pale of civilisation. Thirdly, America is the only country save those which are barred to you where you could play golf!”
“You are really a remarkable young man,” Sabin declared, softly stroking his little grey imperial. “You have read me like a book! I am humiliated that the course of my reasoning should have been so transparent. To prove the correctness of your conclusions, see the little volume which I had brought to read on my way to Liverpool.”
He handed it out to Felix. It was entitled, “The Golf Courses of the World,” and a leaf was turned down at the chapter headed, “United States.”
“I wish,” he remarked, “that you were a golfer! I should like to have asked your opinion about that plan of the Myopia golf links. To me it seems cramped, and the bunkers are artificial.”
Felix looked at him admiringly.
“You are a wonderful man,” he said. “You do not bear me any ill-will then?”
“None in the least,” Mr. Sabin said quietly. “I never bear personal grudges. So far as I am concerned, I never have a personal enemy. It is fate itself which vanquished me. You were simply an instrument. You do not figure in my thoughts as a person against whom I bear any ill-will. I am glad, though, that you did not cash my cheque for £20,000!”