I not only marked them, I prayed for their fulfilment.

There was that in Mr. Cooke which, for want of a better name, I will call instinct.  As he came down the steps, his arm linked in that of the Celebrity, his attitude towards his wife was both apologetic and defiant.  He had at once the air of a child caught with a forbidden toy, and that of a stripling of twenty-one who flaunts a cigar in his father’s face.

“Maria,” he said, “Mr. Allen has consented to come back with us for lunch.”

We drove back to Mohair, Mr. Cooke and the Celebrity on the box, Mrs. Cooke and I behind.  Except to visit the boathouses I had not been to Mohair since the day of its completion, and now the full beauty of the approach struck me for the first time.  We swung by the lodge, the keeper holding open the iron gate as we passed, and into the wide driveway, hewn, as it were, out of the virgin forest.  The sandy soil had been strengthened by a deep road-bed of clay imported from the interior, which was spread in turn with a fine gravel, which crunched under the heavy wheels.  From the lodge to the house, a full mile, branches had been pruned to let the sunshine sift through in splotches, but the wild nature of the place had been skilfully retained.  We curved hither and thither under the giant trees until suddenly, as a whip straightens in the snapping, one of the ancient tribes of the forest might have sent an arrow down the leafy gallery into the open, and at the far end we caught sight of the palace framed in the vista.  It was a triumph for Farrar, and I wished that the palace had been more worthy.

The Celebrity did not stint his praises of Mohair, coming up the drive, but so lavish were his comments on the house that they won for him a lasting place in Mr. Cooke’s affections, and encouraged my client to pull up his horses in a favorable spot, and expand on the beauties of the mansion.

“Taking it altogether,” said he, complacently, “it is rather a neat box, and I let myself loose on it.  I had all these ideas I gathered knocking about the world, and I gave them to Willis, of Philadelphia, to put together for me.  But he’s honest enough not to claim the house.  Take, for instance, that minaret business on the west; I picked that up from a mosque in Algiers.  The oriel just this side is whole cloth from Haddon Hall, and the galleried porch next it from a Florentine villa.  The conical capped tower I got from a French chateau, and some of the features on the south from a Buddhist temple in Japan.  Only a little blending and grouping was necessary, and Willis calls himself an architect, and wasn’t equal to it.  Now,” he added, “get the effect.  Did you ever see another house like it?”

“Magnificent!” exclaimed the Celebrity.

“And then,” my client continued, warming under this generous appreciation, “there’s something very smart about those colors.  They’re my racing colors.  Of course the granite’s a little off, but it isn’t prominent.  Willis kicked hard when it came to painting the oriel yellow, but an architect always takes it for granted he knows it all, and a—­”