If she could play “all the way round” with a fine score before darkness stopped her, Lily felt that her irritations within might be a little soothed; but she found them, on the contrary, increasing. She might have passed the laggard player if she had chosen; but his figure bore an accurate resemblance to that of a gentleman named in her letter as Captain Williams. Lily had her own reasons for avoiding any conversation with Captain Williams, to whom she had been as enigmatic, six months earlier, as she had yesterday been to Henry. She was almost certain, in fact, that the languid golfer was Captain Williams, and so kept far behind him—a difficult matter for one who wished to play at all. She talked broodingly to herself, addressing him. “Old _Thing_!” she called him between her teeth. “Slow Poke! Aren’t you _ever_ going to hit that ball! Oh, my heaven, what are you doing _now_? Writing your score or writing a book? Snail! Tortoise!” And as his procrastinations continued, she called him worse. “Mule!” she said, and corroborated herself vehemently. “Mule, mule, mule! You’re a mule once, you’re a mule twice, you’re a mule a hundred and eighty-seven times over—and that’s only _commencing_ to tell you what you are!” For now, as she waited and waited, withholding her strokes intolerably as the late light waned and waned, she hated him with that great hatred most human beings feel for all things unconsciously and persistently in their way. But in the deepening twilight haze she felt safe to approach him more closely, until finally she was less than an arrow’s flight away. He was upon the last of the greens by this time, and she, unnoticed, stood waiting for him to leave it so that she might drive her ball upon it. But here he delayed interminably. He lay prone upon the ground to study a proper aim, though he studied it so long that his purpose might have been thought a siesta; and when he rose it was to examine the sod by inches. Finally, having completed all these preliminaries and benefited little by them in their consummation, he remained standing upon the green, preoccupied with his score card. “You go on!” Lily said, dangerously. “You aren’t writing a dictionary. Go on!” But he continued to stand, amending and editing his card as though eternity were at everyone’s disposal. The long red ribbons in the western sky merged with the general fog colour of the dusk, and he was but a hazy figure when at last he moved. And as he turned his back and lifted a slow foot to leave the green, Lily, impatient beyond all discretion, cut the air with her heaviest implement.