older members and their friends were
concerned, was centered in that for cup-winners. These constituted the
best players--the veterans of the game--and the contest was sure to be
interesting and close.

Horace Carwell was a "sport," in every meaning of the term. Though a man
well along in his forties, he was as lithe and active as one ten years
younger. He motored, fished, played golf, hunted, and of late had added
yachting to his amusements. He was wealthy, as his father had been
before him, and owned a fine home in New York, but he spent a large part
of every year at Lakeside, where he might enjoy the two sports he loved
best-golfing and yachting.

Viola was an only child, her mother having died when she was about
sixteen, and since then Mr. Carwell's maiden sister had kept watch and
ward over the handsome home, The Haven. Viola, though loving her father
with the natural affection of a daughter and some of the love she had
lavished on her mother, was not altogether in sympathy with the sporting
proclivities of Mr. Carwell.

True, she accompanied him to his golf games and sailed with him or
rode in his big car almost as often as he asked her. And she thoroughly
enjoyed these things. But what she did not enjoy was the rather too
jovial comradeship that followed on the part of the men and women her
father associated with. He was a good liver and a good spender, and he
liked to have about him such persons-men "sleek and fat," who if they
did not "sleep o' nights," at least had the happy faculty of turning
night into day for their own amusement.

So, in a measure, Viola and her father were out of sympathy, as had been
husband and wife before her; though there had never been a whisper of
real incompatibility; nor was there now, between father and daughter.

"Fore!"

It was the warning cry from the first tee to clear the course for the
start of the cup-winners' match. In anticipation of some remarkable
playing, an unusually large gallery would follow the contestants around.
The best caddies had been selected, clubs had been looked to with
care and tested, new balls were got out, and there was much subdued
excitement, as befitted the occasion.

Mr. Carwell, his always flushed face perhaps a trifle more like a mild
sunset than ever, strolled to the first tee. He swung his driver with
freedom and ease to make sure it was the one that best suited him, and
then turned to Major Wardell, his chief rival. "Do you want to tak