The golf course and the casino were crowded next day when Alice arrived. Yet among the throng of men and women, her interest lay only in the meeting of one, as in turn his interest in all the summer company lay only in seeking Alice. She had hardly joined Imogene and the lake coterie when Kimberly appeared.
The players had driven off and the favorites, of whom there were many, could already be trailed across the hills by their following. When the "out" score had been posted, De Castro suggested that the party go down to the tenth hole to follow the leaders in.
A sea-breeze tempered the sunshine and the long, low lines of the club-house were gayly decorated. Pavilions, spread here and there among the trees, gave the landscape a festival air.
On the course, the bright coloring of groups of men and women moving across the fields made a spectacle changing every moment in brilliancy.
Kimberly greeted Alice with a gracious expectancy. He was met with a lack of response nothing less than chilling. Surprised, though fairly seasoned to rebuffs, and accepting the unexpected merely as a difficulty, Kimberly set out to be entertaining.
His resource in this regard was not scanty but to-day Alice succeeded in taxing his reserves. In his half-mile tramp with her in the "gallery," punctuated by occasional halts, he managed but once to separate her from the others. The sun annoyed him. Alice was aware of his lifting his straw hat frequently to press his handkerchief to beads of perspiration that gathered on his swarthy forehead, but she extended no sympathy.
In spite of his discomfort, however, his eyes flashed with their accustomed spirit and his dogged perseverance in the face of her coldness began to plead for itself. When the moving "gallery" had at last left them for an instant behind, Kimberly dropped on a bench under the friendly shade of a thorn apple tree.
"Sit down a moment, do," he begged, "until I get a breath."
"Do you find it warm?"
"Not at all," he responded with negligible irony. "It is in some respects uncommonly chilly." He spoke without the slightest petulance. "For Heaven's sake, tell me what I have done!"