It was natural that Ruth should go to Portsdown. It was there she had met Jimmy: it was there they had become engaged. It would be very painful, and in a way she dreaded the tender, intimate, associations that all the well-known haunts would call up to her mind. Portsdown was so woven up round Jimmy—it would seem almost part of him. That sandy hillock, for instance, just beyond the third tee, where they had lazed away so many afternoons together.
The people in the hotel when she arrived were just those she would have liked. A little elderly, perhaps, but that was in their favour. And she knew them all so intimately. She wondered why she had ever regarded Mrs. Garrett as a consequential old cat. Nothing could have been more charming than her sympathy and consideration, and the others took their tone from her. In fact, the subject of her loss seemed quite inexhaustible.
There were one or two mistakes made, but that was only to be expected.
"Maybe your husband will be being demobilized soon, miss," said Peter Gurney to her a couple of days after her arrival, as she stood on the first tee. To him she would always be miss, and with a faint smile Ruth Seaton turned towards him with her ball in her hand.
"He was killed, Peter," she said—"killed on the Somme." Then she drove a low, clean-hit shot straight up the centre of the course. For a few moments he watched her slim figure as she walked after her ball, and then he went into his shop.
"Hit me over the head with yon niblick, Bob," he remarked, in a voice which was not quite steady. "I surely am a damned, dunderheaded old fool."
She seemed so wonderfully plucky, and even the secretary of the golf club descended from his exalted position temporarily and discussed the matter with Peter Gurney.
He disguised it well—interpolated it in between an argument on the rival merits of two top dressings for the greens: and it was only when he retired again to his sanctum that it struck him that any decision on those rival merits was as unsettled as ever. But then Gurney was such an old fool at times—quite unable to concentrate his attention on the point at issue.
It was on the third day after her arrival that the man came. Hugh Ralton was not a Portsdown habitué, but he had once spent a week-end there, and he remembered the links as being exactly what he wanted—first-class, without being championship. He had come down to practise for the Active Service Championship, and he had hoped to find the Grand empty. An Eveless Eden was what he wanted—golf without distraction.
It was old John who told him Ruth Seaton's story, told it as if it was a personal insult to himself, an effort perpetrated by "them 'Uns" on Portsdown. And at dinner that evening Ralton looked at her curiously.