She grew scarlet, but replied: 

“I know that he is a fraud.”

“Anything else?”

“I can’t say that I do; that is, nothing but what he has told me.”

“If you will forgive my curiosity,” I said, “what has he told you?”

“He says he is the author of The Sybarites,” she answered, her lip curling, “but of course I do not believe that, now.”

“But that happens to be true,” I said, smiling.

She clapped her hands.

“I promised him I wouldn’t tell,” she cried, “but the minute I get back to the inn I shall publish it.”

“No, don’t do that just yet,” said I.

“Why not?  Of course I shall.”

I had no definite reason, only a vague hope that we should get some better sort of enjoyment out of the disclosure before the summer was over.

“You see,” I said, “he is always getting into scrapes; he is that kind of a man.  And it is my humble opinion that he has put his head into a noose this time, for sure.  Mr. Allen, of the ’Miles Standish Bicycle Company,’ whose name he has borrowed for the occasion, is enough like him in appearance to be his twin brother.”

“He has borrowed another man’s name!” she exclaimed; “why, that’s stealing!”

“No, merely kleptomania,” I replied; “he wouldn’t be the other man if he could.  But it has struck me that the real Mr. Allen might turn up here, or some friend of his, and stir things a bit.  My advice to you is to keep quiet, and we may have a comedy worth seeing.”

“Well,” she remarked, after she had got over a little of her astonishment, “it would be great fun to tell, but I won’t if you say so.”

I came to, have a real liking for Miss Trevor.  Farrar used to smile when I spoke of this, and I never could induce him to go out with us in the canoe, which we did frequently,—­in fact, every day I was at Asquith, except of course Sundays.  And we grew to understand each other very well.  She looked upon me in the same light as did my other friends, —­that of a counsellor-at-law,—­and I fell unconsciously into the role of her adviser, in which capacity I was the recipient of many confidences I would have got in no other way.  That is, in no other way save one, and in that I had no desire to go, even had it been possible.  Miss Trevor was only nineteen, and in her eyes I was at least sixty.

“See here, Miss Trevor,” I said to her one day after we had become more or less intimate, “of course it’s none of my business, but you didn’t feel very badly after the Celebrity went away, did you?”

Her reply was frank and rather staggering.

“Yes, I did.  I was engaged to him, you know.”

“Engaged to him!  I had no idea he ever got that far,” I exclaimed.

Miss Trevor laughed merrily.

“It was my fault,” she said; “I pinned him down, and he had to propose.  There was no way out of it.  I don’t mind telling you.”