"Couldn't keep a thing that didn't belong to me, could I?" he observed.
"You have a marvellous gift for discovering lost property," she murmured.
"For discovering the owners, you mean," he retorted, with a little bow.
"You're some golfer, I see, Mr. Lutchester," Van Teyl interposed.
"I was on my game to-day," Lutchester admitted. "With a little luck at the seventh," he continued earnestly, "I might have tied the amateur record. You see, my ball--but there, I mustn't bore you now. I must look after my opponent and stand him a drink. We shall meet again, I daresay."
Lutchester passed on, and Pamela glanced up at her brother.
"Is he a sphinx or a fool?" she whispered.
"Don't ask me," Van Teyl replied. "Seems to me you were a bit rough on him, anyway. I don't see why the fellow shouldn't have a day's holiday before he gets to work. If I had his swing, it would interfere with my career, I know that, well enough."
"Did you recognise the man with whom he was playing?" Pamela inquired.
"Can't say that I did. His face seems familiar, too."
"Go and see if you can find out his name," Pamela begged. "It isn't ordinary curiosity. I really want to know."
"That's easy enough," Van Teyl replied, rising from his place. "And I'll order tea at the same time."
Pamela leaned a little further back in her chair. Her eyes seemed to be fixed upon the pleasant prospect of wooded slopes and green, upward-stretching sward. As a matter of fact, she saw only two faces-- Fischer's and Lutchester's. Her chief impulse in life for the immediate present seemed to have resolved itself into a fierce, almost a passionate curiosity. It was the riddle of those two brains which she was so anxious to solve. ... Fischer, the cold, subtle intriguer, with schemes at the back of his mind which she knew quite well that, even in the moment of his weakness, he intended to keep to himself; and Lutchester, with his almost cynical devotion to pleasure, yet with his unaccountable habit of suggesting a strength and qualities to which he neither laid nor established any claim. Of the two men it was Lutchester who piqued her, with whom she would have found more pleasure in the battle of wits. She found herself alternately furious and puzzled with him, yet her uneasiness concerning him possessed more disquieting, more fascinating possibilities than any of the emotions inspired by the other man.