ter comment to himself.
He didn't know why he looked up; swinging his club for a trial stroke on
a leaf. Look he did, however, to catch the dark eyes of the little
lonely girl intently watching him. If she had called to him aloud "Brace
up!" he couldn't have heard the words more distinctly. He almost
thought he did hear them, and gave the child an involuntary,
half-starved smile.

With the same smile on his lips he sent a faultless approach into easy
putting distance, and he felt absurdly pleased because she clapped her
hands. They halved the hole. Dickson, the Harvard champion, looked bored
as he sank on the bench by the red water-cooler. He had been Willy's
classmate a year ago at college, knowing him as the man who makes all
the best societies and "leads the life" may know the recluse who makes
none; he was conscious of a certain irritation peppering his cool
superiority. To think of the millions that shuffling, cowed-looking,
insignificant chap would have, while he, Dickson, had to slave on a
salary. A duffer who couldn't even win a golf game that belonged to him,
because he was rattled! Dickson felt that the ways of Fate were
scandalous.

Willy had limped up. The day before he had blistered his heel somehow,
and every step cost a pang. He eased the lame foot by resting his weight
on the other. His gray-blue eyes, which only his dead mother had ever
found handsome, scanned with a certain wistfulness Dickson's graceful,
athletic figure and clean, dark profile. His own profile was irregular
and his figure was awkward, with arms too long and shoulders too square
for harmony; he stooped in an ungainly fashion, as if he had the habit
of musing as he walked; his plain face was deeply freckled. Yet as there
was a suggestion of strength in the figure, so there was the same
suggestion in the young mouth and chin, and something clear and
strangely innocent, for a young man, looked out of his eyes. As he
stood, every muscle seemed to sag; he appeared utterly spent; but the
instant Dickson had driven he stepped alertly into his place and sent a
drive like a bird sailing far beyond Dickson's dot of white on the
green. Somehow a new uplift of energy and hope had come to him; bless
that kid, he would show her that he could still do something with the
sticks! He heard her whispered, unconscious "_Beauty!_" This time he
kept his head straight, but when the hole was won, he met her smile
frankly with another. The next hole was easy