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.  And Farrar as a source of amusement proved equal to the best of them.  He would wait until a story was well under way, and then annihilate the point of it with a cutting cynicism and set the table in a roar of laughter.  Among others who were seated here was a Mr. Trevor, of Cincinnati, one of the pioneers of Asquith.  Mr. Trevor was a trifle bombastic, with a tendency towards gesticulation, an art which he had learned in no less a school than the Ohio State Senate.  He was a self-made man,—­a fact which he took good care should not escape one,—­and had amassed his money, I believe, in the dry-goods business.  He always wore a long, shiny coat, a low, turned-down collar, and a black tie, all of which united to give him the general appearance of a professional pallbearer.