"What's the matter?"
"Weren't you giving yourself rather a large family?"
He shook his head moodily.
"Was I?" he said, dully. "I don't know. What's bogey?"
There was a silence.
"And yet——" he said, at last, in a low voice. He paused. An odd, bright look had come into his eyes. He seemed suddenly to be himself again, the old, happy Mortimer Sturgis I had known so well. "And yet," he said, "who knows? Perhaps it is all for the best. They might all have turned out tennis-players!" He raised his niblick again, his face aglow. "Playing thirteen!" he said. "I think the game here would be to chip out through the door and work round the club-house to the green, don't you?"
Little remains to be told. Betty and Eddie have been happily married for years. Mortimer's handicap is now down to eighteen, and he is improving all the time. He was not present at the wedding, being unavoidably detained by a medal tournament; but, if you turn up the files and look at the list of presents, which were both numerous and costly, you will see—somewhere in the middle of the column, the words:
STURGIS, J. MORTIMER.
Two dozen Silver King Golf-balls and one patent Sturgis
Aluminium Self-Adjusting, Self-Compensating Putting-Cleek.