Bob stood and stared after her. What did she mean about the sun? Did she think he had a touch of sunstroke, or brain-fever? It was an inauspicious beginning, indeed. If he had only known what next was coming!
CHAPTER IV – A CHAT ON THE LINKS
At the top of the hill, instead of following the winding road, Bob started leisurely across the rolling green toward the big house whose roof could be discerned in the distance above the trees. The day was charming, but he was distinctly out of tune. There was a frown on his brow. Fate had gone too far. He half-clenched his fists, for he was in a fighting mood and wanted to retaliate – but how? At the edge of some bushes he came upon a lady – no less a personage than the better-half of the commodore, himself.
She was fair, fat and forty, or a little more. She was fooling with a white ball, or rather it was fooling with her, for she didn’t seem to like the place where it lay. She surveyed it from this side and then from that. To the casual observer it looked just the same from whichever point you viewed it. Once or twice the lady, evidently no expert, raised her arm and then lowered it. But apparently, at last, she made up her mind. She was just about to hit the little ball, though whether to top or slice it will never be known, when Bob stepped up from behind the bushes.
“Oh, Mr. Bennett!” He had obviously startled her.
“The same,” said Bob gloomily.
“That’s too bad of you,” she chided him, stepping back.
“What?”
“Why, I’d just got it all figured out in my mind how to do it.”
“Sorry,” said Bob. “I didn’t know you were behind the bushes or I wouldn’t have come out on you like that. But maybe you’ll do even better than you were going to. Hope so! Go ahead with your drive. Don’t mind me.” His tone was depressed, if not sepulchral.
But the lady, being at that sociable age, showed now a perverse disposition not to “go ahead.”
“Just get here?” she asked.
“Yes. Anything doing?”
“Not much. It’s been, in fact, rather slow. Mrs. Ralston says so herself. So I am at liberty to make the same remark. Of course we’ve done the usual things, but somehow there seems to be something lacking,” rattled on the lady. “Maybe we need a few more convivial souls to stir things up. Perhaps we’re waiting for some one, real good and lively, to appear upon the scene. Does the description chance to fit you, Mr. Bennett?” Archly.
“I think not,” said gloomy Bob.
“Well, that isn’t what Mrs. Ralston says about you, anyway,” observed the commodore’s spouse.
“What does she say?”
“‘When Bob Bennett’s around, things begin to hum.’ So you see you have a reputation to live up to.”
“I dare say. No doubt I’ll live up to it, all right.”
“It’s really up to you to stir things up.”
“I’ve begun.” Ominously.
“Have you? How lovely!”
This didn’t require an answer, for it wasn’t really a question. A white ball went by them, a very pretty snoop, and pretty soon another lady and a caddy loomed on their range of vision. The lady was thin and spirituelle and she walked by with a stride. You would have said she had taken lessons of a man. She looked neither to the right nor the left. At the moment, she, at any rate, was not sociably inclined. That walk meant business. She wasn’t one of those fussy beginners like the lady Bob was talking with.
“Isn’t that Mrs. Clarence Van Duzen?” asked Bob.
“Yes. She, too, poor dear, has had to desert hubby. Exactions of business! Clarence simply couldn’t get away. You see he’s director of so many things. And poor, dear old Dan! So busy! Every day at the office! So pressed with business.”
“Quite so,” said Bob absently. “I mean – ” He stopped. He knew Dan wasn’t pressed for business and Bob couldn’t utter even the suspicion of an untruth now. “Didn’t exactly mean that!” he mumbled.
The lady regarded him quickly. His manner was just in the least strange. But in a moment she thought no more about it.
“You didn’t happen to see Dan?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“At his office, I suppose?” Dan had written he hadn’t even had time for his club; that it had been just work – work all the time.
“No.”
“Where, then?”
“At the club and some other places.” Reluctantly.
“Other places?” Lightly. Of course she hadn’t really believed quite all Dan had written about that office confinement. “How dreadfully ambiguous!” With a laugh. “What other places?”
Bob began to get uneasy. “Well, we went to a cabaret or two.” No especial harm about that answer.
“Of course,” said the lady. “Why not?”
Bob felt relieved. He didn’t want to make trouble. He was too miserable himself. He trusted that would end the talk and now regarded the neglected ball suggestively.
“And then you went to still some other places?” went on the lady in that same light, unoffended tone.
“Ye-es,” Bob had to admit.
“One of those roof gardens, perhaps, where they have entertainments?” she suggested brightly.
Bob acknowledged they had gone to a roof garden. And again, and more suggestively, he eyed the little white ball. But Mrs. Dan seemed to have forgotten all about it.
“Roof gardens,” she said. “I adore roof gardens. They are such a boon to the people. I told dear Dan to be sure not to miss them. So nice to think of him enjoying himself instead of moping away in a stuffy old office.”
Bob gazed at her suspiciously. But she had such an open face! One of those faces one can’t help trusting. Mrs. Dan was just the homely, plain old-fashioned type. At least, so she seemed. Anyhow, it didn’t much matter so far as Bob was concerned. He had to tell the truth. He hadn’t sought this conversation. It was forced on him. He was only going the “even tenor of his way.” He was, however, rather pleased that Mrs. Dan did seem in some respects different from others of her sex. Bob didn’t, of course, really know much about the sex.
“So you went to the roof garden – just you and Dan,” purred Mrs. Dan.
Bob didn’t answer. He hoped she hadn’t really put that as a question.
“Or were you and Dan alone?” She made it a question now.
“No-a.”
“Who else were along?”
“Dickie – ”
“And – ?”
“Clarence.”
She gazed toward Mrs. Clarence, while a shade of anxiety appeared on Bob’s face. In the distance Mrs. Clarence had paused to contemplate the result of an unusually satisfactory display of skill. Mrs. Dan next glanced sidewise at her caddy, but that young man seemed to have relapsed into a condition of innocuous vacancy. He looked capable of falling asleep standing. Certainly he wasn’t trying to overhear.
“Just you four men!” Mrs. Dan resumed her purring. “Or were you all alone? No ladies along?”
While expecting, of course, the negative direct, she was studying Bob and gleaning what she could, surreptitiously, or by inference. He had an eloquent face which might tell her something his lips refused to reveal. His answer almost took her breath away.
“Ye-es.”
He