The day had opened so brightly, in such a welcome wave of April

sunshine, that by mid-afternoon there were two hundred players

scattered over the links of the Long Island Country Club at

Belvedere Bay; the men in thick plaid stockings and loose striped

sweaters, the women's scarlet coats and white skirts making

splashes of vivid color against the fresh green of grass and the

thick powdering of dandelions. It was Saturday, and a half-

holiday; it was that one day of all the year when the seasons

change places, when winter is visibly worsted, and summer, with

warmth and relaxation, bathing and tennis and motor trips in the

moonlight, becomes again a reality.

There was a real warmth in the sunshine to-day, there was a

fragrance of lilac and early roses in the idle breezes. "Hot!"

shouted the players exultantly, as they passed each other in the

green valleys and over the sunny mounds. "You bet it's hot!"

agreed stout and glowing gentlemen, wiping wet foreheads before

reaching for a particular club, and panting as they gazed about at

the unbroken turf, melting a few miles away into the new green of

maple and elm trees, and topped, where the slope rose, by the

white columns and brick walls of the clubhouse.

Motor cars swept incessantly back and forth on the smooth roadway;

a few riders, their horses wheeling and dancing, went down the

bridle path, and there was a sprinkling of young men and women and

some shouting and clapping on the tennis-courts. But golf was the

order of the day. At the first tee at least two scores of

impatient players waited their turn to drive off, and at the last

green a group of twenty or thirty men and women, mostly women,

were interestedly watching the putting.

Mrs. Archibald Buckney, a large, generously made woman of perhaps

fifty, who stood a little apart from the group, with two young

women and a mild-looking blond young man, suddenly interrupted a

general discussion of scores and play with a personality.

"Is Clarence Breckenridge playing to-day, I wonder? Anybody seen

him?"

"Must be," said the more definite of the two rather indefinite

girls, with an assumption of bright interest. Leila Buckney, a few

weeks ago, had announced her engagement to the mild-looking blond

young man, Parker Hoyt, and she was just now attempting to hold

him by a charm she suspected she did not possess for him, and at

the same time to give her mother and sister the impression that

Parker was so deeply in her toils that she need make no further

effort to enslave him.




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