A sea-breeze tempered the sunshine and the long, low lines of the club-house were gayly decorated. Pavilions, spread here and there among the trees, gave the landscape a festival air.
On the course, the bright coloring of groups of men and women moving across the fields made a spectacle changing every moment in brilliancy.
Kimberly greeted Alice with a gracious expectancy. He was met with a lack of response nothing less than chilling. Surprised, though fairly seasoned to rebuffs, and accepting the unexpected merely as a difficulty, Kimberly set out to be entertaining.
His resource in this regard was not scanty but to-day Alice succeeded in taxing his reserves. In his half-mile tramp with her in the "gallery," punctuated by occasional halts, he managed but once to separate her from the others. The sun annoyed him. Alice was aware of his lifting his straw hat frequently to press his handkerchief to beads of perspiration that gathered on his swarthy forehead, but she extended no sympathy.
In spite of his discomfort, however, his eyes flashed with their accustomed spirit and his dogged perseverance in the face of her coldness began to plead for itself. When the moving "gallery" had at last left them for an instant behind, Kimberly dropped on a bench under the friendly shade of a thorn apple tree.
"Sit down a moment, do," he begged, "until I get a breath."
"Not at all," he responded with negligible irony. "It is in some respects uncommonly chilly." He spoke without the slightest petulance. "For Heaven’s sake, tell me what I have done!"
"I mean, you are not kind in your manner toward me. I left you--I hoped you would remember--to do a favor for you----"
"For me?" Her tone was not in the least reassuring.
"At least, I conceived it to be for you," he replied.
"Very good. Let us call it mistake number one. I spent five days with Dolly and her guests----"
"Guests," repeated Alice, lingering slightly on the word, as she poked the turf slowly with her sunshade, "or guest?"
"Guest!" he echoed, "Ah!" He paused. "Who has put me wrong in so simple a matter? What I did was no more than to be agreeable to Dolly’s guests. I spent much time with the guest of honor at Dolly’s repeated requests. She happened to sing a song that pleased me very much, for one particular reason; it was your lovely little Italian air; I am not ashamed to say it brought back pleasant moments. Since she could do nothing else that was so pleasing," he continued, "I kept her singing the song. She became bored and naturally ceased to be good-natured. Then, Dolly asked me to run around by Nantucket, which we could have done in two days. Not to be churlish, I consented. Then the coal gave out, which took another day."
