She had turned pale again, notwithstanding the sunshine and the freshening wind.  He laid his hand lightly upon her arm.  She suffered his touch without appearing to notice it.

“Ah, you mustn’t talk like that!” he pleaded.  “Do you know what you make me feel like?”

She came back from the world of her own unhappy imaginings.

“Really, I forgot myself,” she declared, with a little smile.  “Never mind, it does one good sometimes.  One up, are you?  Henceforth, then, golf—­all the rigour of the game, mind.”

He fell in with her mood, and their conversation touched only upon the game.  On the last green he suffered defeat and acknowledged it with a little grimace.

“If I might say so, Miss Fentolin,” he protested, “you are a little too good for your handicap.  I used to play a very reasonable scratch myself, but I can’t give you the strokes.”

She smiled.

“Doubtless your long absence abroad,” she began slowly, “has affected your game.”

“I was round in eighty-one,” he grumbled.

“You must have travelled in many countries,” she continued, “where golf was an impossibility.”

“Naturally,” he admitted.  “Let us stay and have lunch and try again.”

She shook her head with a little sigh of regret.

“You see, the car is waiting,” she pointed out.  “We are expected home.  I shan’t be a minute putting my clubs away.”

They sped swiftly along the level road towards St. David’s Hall.  Far in the distance they saw it, built upon that strange hill, with the sunlight flashing in its windows.  He looked at it long and curiously.

“I think,” he said, “that yours is the most extraordinarily situated house I have ever seen.  Fancy a gigantic mound like that in the midst of an absolutely flat marsh.”

She nodded.

“There is no other house quite like it in England,” she said.  “I suppose it is really a wonderful place.  Have you looked at the pictures?”

“Not carefully,” he told her.

“You must before you leave,” she insisted.  “Mr. Fentolin is a great judge, and so was his father.”

Their road curved a little to the sea, and at its last bend they were close to the pebbly ridge on which the Tower was built.  He touched the electric bell and stopped the car.

“Do let us walk along and have a look at my queer possession once more,” he begged.  “Luncheon, you told me, is not till half-past one, and it is a quarter to now.”

She hesitated for a moment and then assented.  They left the car and walked along the little track, bordered with white posts, which led on to the ridge.  To their right was the village, separated from them only by one level stretch of meadowland; in the background, the hall.  They turned along the raised dike just inside the pebbly beach, and she showed her companion the narrow waterway up to the village.  At its entrance was a tall iron upright, with a ladder attached and a great lamp at the top.