Mr. Cooke had laid out Mohair as ruthlessly as Napoleon planned the new Paris; though not, I regret to say, with a like genius.  Fortunately Farrar interposed and saved the grounds, but there was no guardian angel to do a like turn for the house.  Mr. Langdon Willis, of Philadelphia, was the architect who had nominal charge of the building.  He had regularly submitted some dozen plans for Mr. Cooke’s approval, which were as regularly rejected.  My client believed, in common with a great many other people, that architects should be driven and not followed, and was plainly resolved to make this house the logical development of many cherished ideas.  It is not strange, therefore, that the edifice was completed by a Chicago contractor who had less self-respect than Mr. Willis, the latter having abruptly refused to have his name tacked on to the work.

Mohair was finished and ready for occupation in July, two years after the suit.  I drove out one day before Mr. Cooke’s arrival to look it over.  The grounds, where Farrar had had matters pretty much his own way, to my mind rivalled the best private parks in the East.  The stables were filled with a score or so of Mr. Cooke’s best horses, brought hither in his private cars, and the trotters were exercising on the track.  The middle of June found Farrar and myself at the Asquith Inn.  It was Farrar’s custom to go to Asquith in the summer, being near the forest properties in his charge; and since Asquith was but five miles from the county-seat it was convenient for me, and gave me the advantages of the lake breezes and a comparative rest, which I should not have had in town.  At that time Asquith was a small community of summer residents from Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, and other western cities, most of whom owned cottages and the grounds around them.  They were a quiet lot that long association had made clannish; and they had a happy faculty, so rare in summer resorts, of discrimination between an amusement and a nuisance.  Hence a great many diversions which are accounted pleasurable elsewhere are at Asquith set down at their true value.  It was, therefore, rather with resentment than otherwise that the approaching arrival of Mr. Cooke and the guests he was likely to have at Mohair were looked upon.

I had not been long at Asquith before I discovered that Farrar was acting in a peculiar manner, though I was longer in finding out what the matter was.  I saw much less of him than in town.  Once in a while in the evenings, after ten, he would run across me on the porch of the inn, or drift into my rooms.  Even after three years of more or less intimacy between us, Farrar still wore his exterior of pessimism and indifference, the shell with which he chose to hide a naturally warm and affectionate disposition.  In the dining-room we sat together at the end of a large table set aside for bachelors and small families of two or three, and it seemed as though we had all the humorists and story-tellers in that place.