Much of this persecution I might have put up with, indeed, had I not heard, in one way or another, that he was doing me the honor of calling me his intimate.  This I could not stand, and I soberly resolved to leave Asquith and go back to town, which I should indeed have done if deliverance had not arrived from an unexpected quarter.

One morning I had been driven to the precarious refuge afforded by the steps of the inn, after rejecting offers from the Celebrity to join him in a variety of amusements.  But even here I was not free from interruption, for he was seated on a horse-block below me, playing with a fox terrier.  Judge Short had gone to town, and Farrar was off for a three days’ cruise up the lake.  I was bitterly regretting I had not gone with him when the distant notes of a coach horn reached my ear, and I descried a four-in-hand winding its way up the inn road from the direction of Mohair.

“That must be your friend Cooke,” remarked the Celebrity, looking up.

There could be no doubt of it.  With little difficulty I recognized on the box the familiar figure of my first important client, and beside him was a lady whom I supposed to be Mrs. Farquhar Fenelon Cooke, although I had had no previous knowledge that such a person existed.  The horses were on a brisk trot, and Mr. Cooke seemed to be getting the best out of them for the benefit of the sprinkling of people on the inn porch.  Indeed, I could not but admire the dexterous turn of the wrist which served Mr. Cooke to swing his leaders into the circle and up the hill, while the liveried guard leaned far out in anticipation of a stumble.  Mr. Cooke hailed me with a beaming smile and a flourish of the whip as he drew up and descended from the box.

“Maria,” he exclaimed, giving me a hearty grip, “this is the man that won Mohair.  My wife, Crocker.”

I was somewhat annoyed at this effusiveness before the Celebrity, but I looked up and caught Mrs. Cooke’s eye.  It was the calm eye of a general.

“I am glad of the opportunity to thank you, Mr. Crocker,” she said simply.  And I liked her from that moment.

Mr. Cooke at once began a tirade against the residents of Asquith for permitting a sandy and generally disgraceful condition of the roads.  So roundly did he vituperate the inn management in particular, and with such a loud flow of words, that I trembled lest he should be heard on the veranda.  The Celebrity stood by the block, in an amazement which gave me a wicked pleasure, and it was some minutes before I had the chance to introduce him.

Mr. Cooke’s idea of an introduction, however, was no mere word-formula:  it was fraught with a deeper and a bibulous meaning.  He presented the Celebrity to his wife, and then invited both of us to go inside with him by one of those neat and cordial paraphrases in which he was skilled.  I preferred to remain with Mrs. Cooke, and it was with a gleam of hope at a possible deliverance from my late persecution that I watched the two disappear together through the hall and into the smoking-room.