“I never hazard guesses about my friends,” said the inexorable Lady Millebrook. “But I feel, somehow, that she may have been you?”
“I was weak,” admitted Mrs. Tollebranch, clasping her friend’s hand with agitated jeweled fingers. “But not wicked, Bettine. Promise me to believe that!”
“I never promise,” said Bettine, “but no one could look at you and doubt that ... whatever you might do, would be the outcome of irresistible impulse, not the result of deliberate—ahem! My dearest, you interest me indescribably,” she cried, “and if I were the least bit inclined to curiosity, I am sure I should implore you to go on.”
“You shall hear the story of Cadminster’s Great Sacrifice, Bettine,” said Mrs. Tollebranch, “and when you have heard, you will regard him——”
“As Bayard and all the other heroes of chivalry rolled into one, and dressed by a Bond Street tailor,” interrupted Lady Millebrook, with a glow of impatience in her fine dark eyes. “I think you mentioned two years ago?” she added, settling a little stray lock of her friend’s silken blonde hair, and sinking back among her cushions.
“Two years ago,” murmured Mrs. Tollebranch, “Willibrand became bitten with the Golf Spider. He is as wild about the game to-day,” she added, “as ever.”
“There is a proverb, ‘Once a golfer, always a golfer,’” put in Lady Millebrook. “I believe that to play the game successfully requires a vast amount of thought and judgment, which insensibly diverts a man’s mind from less harmless topics, and that it entails an invigorating and healthy action of the arms and legs, soothing to the nervous system, and improving in its effect upon the temper. Were I asked by any married woman of my acquaintance whether she should encourage her husband in his devotion to golf, or dissuade him from it, I should advise her to encourage the fad. The game, unlike others, can be played all the year round, in sunshine, rain, or snow.”
“Willibrand used to play it in the snow,” put in Mrs. Tollebranch, “with red balls. It was when we were spending March at Tobermuirie two years ago, that——”
“That Lord Cadminster performed the chivalrous action which resulted for him in the permanent loss of his digestion? Well?”
“Tobermuirie is the bleakest spot in North Britain,” began Mrs. Tollebranch, returning the teacups to the tray, and touching the electric bell in a manner which conveyed the intimation that she would not be at home to any caller for the next quarter of an hour. “The castle is one of the oldest inhabited residences in Europe, and, I verily believe, the coldest. If you would like to find out for yourself how easily a northern gale can penetrate walls ten feet thick in the thinnest places, come to us in July.”