"The sportsman who wrote that article about walking tours." It was then the smile broke bounds. "We’ve got some topping peaches in the garden. Couldn’t you send him some of those as—a payment on account?" _*XI — The Poser*_ No one could call Portsdown-on-Sea a fashionable place. To the chosen few it constituted the most delightful seaside resort in the south of England. But very few did know, and they guarded their secret jealously. They formed a clique—the Portsdown clique—and the stranger within their gates was not welcomed. The Grand was their stronghold, and during the winter the hotel relapsed into sleep, wrapped in a drab garment of dust sheets and chair covers. A few of the rooms were kept open all the year round for anyone who might have business in the town; or for stray, foolhardy golfers who found the grey scudding mist which whipped over the salt marshes a cure for the cobwebs of an office life. But their stay was never a long one. Three or four days, a week-end perhaps—and then once again the melancholy waiter would preside over an empty dining-room. He formed the nucleus of the staff—did John. Each spring he blossomed forth into a crowd of young and more or less disreputable minions; each autumn he shrank back again to his solitary grandeur. And Martha, the female representative of the establishment, did likewise amongst the chambermaid portion of the servants. During the war, business, even in the height of the season, had not been good. The Get-Rich-Quick brigade, whose horizon was bounded by half-crown cigars and champagne at any and every hour of the day, found Portsdown slow. There was no band and there was no theatre, and there is but little use in drinking champagne at eleven in the morning unless less fortunate beings—professional men with a small income, or wounded officers—can see the deed and gnash their teeth with envy. And the cigar with the band round it quite failed to impress Peter Gurney, the professional at the club-house. He eyed it with disfavour, and ostentatiously stood up-wind if compelled to give a lesson to its proud owner. "These ’ere links are for gowf," he remarked once in a burst of confidence to Sawyer, his one-legged assistant, "not for the decimation of them stinking poison-gases." And Sawyer, though he had an idea that something was wrong with the phraseology of the latter part of the remark, grunted an assent. But, with the signing of the Armistice, visions of better days ahead loomed up in the minds of all who were interested in the welfare of Portsdown. Peter Gurney laid in an increased stock of hickory wood, to make clubs for "them as can use ’em." The secretary of the golf club turned his mind more resolutely to questions of greens and labour, and rent his clothes and tore his hair on the matter of the unemployment bonus.