The fifteenth was halved. The Squire smiled again. Joyce had the honour. She drove steadily, keeping well to the left. Margot felt disagreeably nervous, as she addressed the ball. Going back too quickly, she stabbed down, topping it badly. The Squire whistled.
“We’re in trouble, my dear.”
They were. The luck had changed. Margot had to play two more after the Squire’s shot. She achieved a fine stroke too late to save the hole. One up and two to play.
“Close finish,” said Lionel cheerily.
The seventeenth hole is only easy for an accomplished golfer. If you take a driver for the tee shot you go too far; unless you are a fine “iron” player you fall lamentably short. Lionel took his cleek, and was short, but well in the fairway. The Squire selected that old and trusty servant—a spoon.
“This does the trick,” he observed to his partner. “There you are, Margot—a possible two, my dear.”
He chuckled complacently, taking Margot’s arm. He believed the match was over. The ball he had just driven lay some three yards from the hole.
Lionel said to Joyce: “If you want to wipe your shoes on me, Joyce, I’ll lie down and let you do it.”
Joyce asked her caddie for a mashie.
The shot presented no great difficulties, except that it was necessary to lay the ball dead at a distance of forty yards. To Lionel’s delight she succeeded famously, leaving her partner a putt of three feet upon a level green.