"Perhaps I wasn't as cool as I looked. See here, Aurora, you mustn't talk like that." He had turned and before she could escape him, had taken her in his arms and was kissing her. "Don't say I'm cool. I love you, Aurora, with every ounce that's in me. I want you more than I can ever want anything again in this world or the next. I'm not going to let you marry that fellow or anybody else--do you understand?" She had yielded for a moment to his warmth because there didn't seem to be anything else to do. But when she slowly disengaged herself from his arms and faced him her eyes were wet and the color flamed through her tan. "Steve!" she stammered. "Steve!--how could you?" But he still faced her passionately, undaunted. "It's true," he said huskily. "I love you--you can't marry him--I won't let you----" He took a step forward but this time she retreated. "Don't, Steve--not again--not now--you mustn't. They'll be coming out in the open there in a moment. I'll never say you are cool again--never--after that. You're not cool--not in the least--I was mistaken. I've never seen you--like this before--you're different----" "You made me do it. I couldn't stand your saying I didn't care. I'm not sorry," he went on, "he couldn't love you the way I do." "I think perhaps you're right," said Aurora coolly. "In the meantime----" "Won't you give me an answer?" "In the meanwhile," she went on, preening her disordered hair, "you are supposed to be playing the golf of the New Era----" [Illustration: "'You are supposed to be playing the golf of the New Era.'"] "Aurora----" "No," she had taken up his golf bag and was walking away. "Won't you answer me?" he pleaded. "Get your ball out of this quarry," she said, relentlessly, "and I'll think about it." It took Steve Ventnor thirteen strokes to play out of that quarry, which, for a fellow with a record of seventy-two at Apawomeck, was "going it." The first stroke he missed clean; the second he sliced into a clay-bank; his third struck the rocks and bounded back against the wall behind him, finding lodgment at last in some bushes where he took three more. To make matters worse, Aurora was laughing at him, hysterically, unrestrainedly, and Patricia and the Sphynx, who had appeared on the path above, were joining in the merriment. "Oh, I'll lift," he growled at last. "You can't," laughed Aurora. "It's against the rules." And Patricia appealed to, confirmed the statement. Three more swings he took, each of them in impossible lies, the last of which smashed his niblick. After that there followed a period of strange calmness--of desperation, while he worked his ball into a good lie on the far side of the quarry from which, with a fine mashie shot he lifted it over the cliffs and into the open beyond.