t of the ball. He walked up to it.

"Are you playing bounds?" he shouted, lifting his cap.

"Yes!" answered LaHume, "throw it back!"

Wallace carried a stout stick of some kind in his hand. He looked at the
end of it critically, placed the ball on a clod of soil, glanced at us
and called "Fore!" and then lofted that ball with as clean a shot as ever
I saw, dropping it almost at LaHume's feet. He bowed again, twirled the
stick about his fingers, and then turned and went toward the farmhouse.

[Illustration: "Fore"]

"Well, what do you think of the cold nerve of that clodhopper?"
exclaimed LaHume, staring at the retreating figure of Wallace. "I
presume he has ruined that new ball."

"Not with that stroke," I said. "I wish I could make as good an approach
with any club in my bag as he did with that improvised cane."

I picked up the ball and found that there was not a blemish on it.

"Wasn't he a handsome young gentleman?" murmured Miss Lawrence, whose
eyes had been fixed on Wallace until he vanished behind a clump of
trees. "Who is he?"

"Gentleman?" laughed LaHume, teeing the ball. "He's a farm labourer; old
Bishop's hired man. One of his duties is to deliver milk every morning
at the club house."

"Indeed!" exclaimed Miss Lawrence. "I presume it is impossible for him
to attend to such duties and remain a gentleman."

"Not impossible, but highly improbable," laughed young LaHume, unaware
that he was treading on thin ice.

"My father made his start in that way, and before he died there were
many who called themselves gentlemen who were glad to associate with
him," declared Miss Lawrence with a warmth uncommon to her. "What did
your father do?"

"Really now, I did not mean anything," stammered LaHume, the red
flushing through the tan of his face. It suddenly dawned on me that
there was a period in the life of my father when he worked as a hired
man in order to earn the money with which to marry my mother, and that
from this humble start he was able finally to acquire the ancestral
Smith farm, then in the possession of a more wealthy branch of the
family. I made common cause with Miss Lawrence, and I did it with better
grace from the fact that I resent the airs assumed by LaHume.

"LaHume's father founded the roadhouse down yonder," I said, pointing
towards a resort which yet goes by the LaHume name, and one which does
not enjoy a reputation any too savory. Of course this is not the fault
of the elder LaHum