The day had opened so brightly, in such a welcome wave of April
sunshine, that by mid-afternoon there were two hundred players
scattered over the links of the Long Island Country Club at
Belvedere Bay; the men in thick plaid stockings and loose striped
sweaters, the women's scarlet coats and white skirts making
splashes of vivid color against the fresh green of grass and the
thick powdering of dandelions. It was Saturday, and a half-
holiday; it was that one day of all the year when the seasons
change places, when winter is visibly worsted, and summer, with
warmth and relaxation, bathing and tennis and motor trips in the
moonlight, becomes again a reality.
There was a real warmth in the sunshine to-day, there was a
fragrance of lilac and early roses in the idle breezes. "Hot!"
shouted the players exultantly, as they passed each other in the
green valleys and over the sunny mounds. "You bet it's hot!"
agreed stout and glowing gentlemen, wiping wet foreheads before
reaching for a particular club, and panting as they gazed about at
the unbroken turf, melting a few miles away into the new green of
maple and elm trees, and topped, where the slope rose, by the
white columns and brick walls of the clubhouse.
Motor cars swept incessantly back and forth on the smooth roadway;
a few riders, their horses wheeling and dancing, went down the
bridle path, and there was a sprinkling of young men and women and
some shouting and clapping on the tennis-courts. But golf was the
order of the day. At the first tee at least two scores of
impatient players waited their turn to drive off, and at the last
green a group of twenty or thirty men and women, mostly women,
were interestedly watching the putting.
Mrs. Archibald Buckney, a large, generously made woman of perhaps
fifty, who stood a little apart from the group, with two young
women and a mild-looking blond young man, suddenly interrupted a
general discussion of scores and play with a personality.
"Is Clarence Breckenridge playing to-day, I wonder? Anybody seen
him?"
"Must be," said the more definite of the two rather indefinite
girls, with an assumption of bright interest. Leila Buckney, a few
weeks ago, had announced her engagement to the mild-looking blond
young man, Parker Hoyt, and she was just now attempting to hold
him by a charm she suspected she did not possess for him, and at
the same time to give her mother and sister the impression that
Parker was so deeply in her toils that she need make no further
effort to enslave him.