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Quite suddenly, from so close at hand that she positively leaped off the pavement into the middle of the road, the door was thrown open and the duet, louder than ever, streamed out into the street. Major Benjy bounced out on to the threshold, and stumbled down the two steps that led from the door. "Tell you it was a worm-cast," he bellowed. "Think I don't know a worm-cast when I see a worm-cast?"
That being settled, the still undecided point about the worm-cast gave rise to a good deal of heat, until, it being discovered that the window was open, and that their voices might easily carry as far as the garden-room, they made malignant rejoinders to each other in whispers.
"Can't see a thing." Pickings, holding the flag in the cup, said savagely: "Shoot!" The ball advanced in a zigzag path, running from worm-cast to a worm-cast, wobbling and rocking, and at the last, as though preordained, fell plump into the cup! At the same moment, Pickings and Booverman, as though carried off by the same cannon-ball, flattened on the green.
"Most offensive remark," he said. "I wasn't called Sporting Benjy in the regiment for nothing. But never mind that. A worm-cast " "It wasn't a worm-cast," said Puffin. "It was sheep's dung!" Luck had veered here: the Major had felt sure that Puffin would reiterate that utterly untrue contention.
"I can't pretend to be such a specialist as you in those matters," he said, "but you must allow me sufficient power of observation to know a worm-cast when I see it. It was a worm-cast, sir, a cast of a worm, and you had no right to remove it. If you will do me the favour to consult the rules of golf ?"
On the golf course, Stanton was impossibly good. One long drive to the green, one putt to the cup. An easy thirty-six strokes for eighteen holes; an occasional hole-in-one sometimes brought him below that, an occasional worm-cast or stray wind sometimes raised his score. "Sure," Stanton said. "A handicap. What kind of handicap do you want on a handball game with me?"
Suddenly his tone changed: this was getting too near a quarrel. "Well, good-night, old fellow," he said. "Jolly evening." He turned and saw, veiled and indistinct in the mist, the female figure in the roadway. Undying coquetry, as Mr. Stevenson so finely remarked, awoke, for the topic preceding the worm-cast had been "the sex."
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