ELSIE walked on. Her face was set, and her blue-grey eyes had a steely look. In her hand she carried a golf-ball--not the one which poor Pip had "discovered" in the hole, but another, her own, the genuine article. She had spied it, lying in an absolutely unplayable position under a stone, almost immediately after Pip had left her to her handkerchief. She had picked it up, and was on her way back to the green to inform her opponent that the match was his, when she was startled by a mighty shout, and arrived in time to witness the whole of Pip's elaborate conjuring-trick. She grasped the situation at once, and all the woman in her blazed up at this monstrous piece of impertinence. Her anger caused her to overlook the fact that Pip, in his desire to save her from mortification, had deliberately sacrificed his chances and thrown away the spoils of victory. For the moment, all she realised was that he had "patronised" her, treated her like a spoiled child, and allowed her to win. Her blood boiled at the idea. She walked on quickly. It was not until she had proceeded for a couple of hundred yards that she discovered that she was going in the wrong direction. The ninth hole was situated at the extreme end of the links, and as she had turned on her heel and swung off more with the idea of abandoning her present locality than of reaching another, she realised that, if she continued on her present course, every step would take her farther from the hotel. The discovery added to her wrath. She was making herself ridiculous now. Pip had probably noticed her mistake, and was in all likelihood still standing on the green laughing at her. Return and walk past him she would not. Only one thing remained to be done: she would turn in among the neighbouring sand-hills, make a détour, and walk home along the shore. A friendly gap between two hillocks presented itself on her left, and she swung round and made for it. As she passed through the entrance she could not help looking back. Pip was sitting on the tee-box beside the now distant green. His chin was buried in his hands, and he was gazing out to sea, with his pipe projecting from his mouth at a reflective angle. Elsie knew that attitude. "He's thinking the situation over," she said to herself. "Let him: it will do him good. Oh, dear! where have I got to now?" She walked into a tiny amphitheatre. All round her rose walls of fine, shifting, running sand. They sloped up gradually, to where they had fallen away from the surrounding summit, leaving a crumbling precipice six or seven feet high, crowned with a projecting rim of treacherous turf,--a natural bunker if ever there was one, and almost as difficult of exit for a girl as for a golf-ball.