Miss Dangerfield confided to me that she is making a collection of balls.

“I am awfully lucky,” she said, looking critically at Chilvers’ ball.  “Whenever I find one I keep it as a memento of the game; that is, of course, if it is nice and clean like this one.”

“As a memento?” I inquired.

“Certainly,” she declared.  “I have a cute little brush and some water colours.  I paint the date of discovery on the ball and add it to my collection.  Sometimes I paint flowers on the ball, and sometimes birds and other things.  You should see my collection!  Don’t you think it’s a real cute idea?”

“It is startlingly original,” I said, and her bright and innocent smile showed her appreciation of the compliment.  “How many have you in your collection?”

[Illustration:  “Fore there! hay there!!”]

“Oh, lots and lots of them,” she said.  “I am to have a portrait of myself done in oil, showing me in a golfing costume just about to knock the ball as far as I can, and the frame will be composed of golf balls I have found.  Oh, here’s another lost ball!” and she started for one which was lying on the fair green not many yards away.  I knew to whom it belonged.

“Fore!  Fore!  Hi, hay there; drop it; that’s my ball!” yelled a club member named Pepper, coming on a run from behind a bunker.  Pepper is a married man, near the fifty-year mark, and he is extremely nervous and even irritable when any one approaches his ball.

“Don’t touch it!” shouted Pepper, now on a dead run.  “You’ll make me lose the hole!  Don’t you know the make of the ball you’re playing?  Mine is a Kempshall remade.”

“Oh, this is not my ball,” frankly declared Miss Dangerfield.  “My ball is over there, but I thought this was one which had been lost.”

“I pitched it out of that trap a moment ago,” insisted Pepper, “and did not take my eyes off it.”

“I am sure I do not want it if it is yours!” haughtily declared Miss Dangerfield, turning indignantly away.

“Thank you,” said Pepper, politely as he knows how, and we went on our way leaving him to recover his composure as best he could.  I looked back and noted that he fumbled his next shot.

“If I thought as much as that of a mere golf ball I would never play the game,” pouted Miss Dangerfield.  “I think he is horrid, and I shall never speak to him again!”

“If he had lost the ball he would have lost the hole,” I explained, anxious to extenuate Pepper’s offense as much as possible.

“Suppose he did lose the old hole!” exclaimed the wronged young lady.  “What does it amount to if you lose one insignificant hole when there are eighteen in all?”

I could think of nothing else to say, and had the tact to change the conversation to the unique frame for her portrait with its “lost ball” border.

“You will save material and secure a more artistic effect,” I suggested, “by having an artisan cut the balls in halves.  They will then lie flat to the frame, and one ball will do the service of two.”