The Ancient owed his eminence to the fact that no detail was too mean for his capacious mind. Besides, he was as strenuous, serious, and self-centred as a novelist with a circulation of a hundred thousand copies.
Much to the relief of Wiggles and ourselves, the sight of a perfect broad-shouldered giant of a fellow issuing from the pavilion at this moment, clad in flannels, bat in hand, lured the young person in brown holland from her very inconvenient and highly dangerous station at the wicket.
“Hi, Archie, got a ball?” she cried at the pitch of a splendid pair of lungs.
“Hullo, Grace!” replied the giant in a voice by no means the inferior of her own. “You’re just the very chap. I want half a dozen down. Let’s cut across there to the nets. Here you are. Look out!”
Thereon the giant hurled a ball a terrific height into the eye of the sun. It seemed so perilously like descending on our heads that poor Wiggles put up his hands and began to run for his life. Not so the young person in brown holland. She stepped two or three yards backward, moved a little to one side, shaded her eyes a moment from the glare to sight the catch, and next instant had the leather tucked beautifully under her chin in a manner worthy of a G. J. Mordaunt.
“Wiggles,” said I, “do you happen to know who that lady is?”
“Wish I did, sir,” said Wiggles feebly. “She’s a terror, ain’t she? But I hope she don’t come here too often. I reckon she’s a Trentham, she is. That wor A. H. what just come out. Lord, and just look at that theer gal a bowlin’ at ’un. She sets ’un back on his sticks an’ all.”
We turned our attention to the nets, and beheld her bowling slow hanging length balls to A. H. Trentham, almost a facsimile of Alfred Shaw.
“I tell you, Dimsdale,” said the Ancient, “if this is what lovely woman’s coming to, it’s high time some of us crocks took to golf. I wonder if Miss Grace plays for M.C.C. I notice she’s got their colours on. I’ve always contended that they never look so well as when worn by W. G., but I’m hanged if this new Grace don’t give the Old Man points.”