“Oh,” I remarked, and there words failed me.

Her mouth was twitching with merriment.

“I am afraid you will have to solve the rest of it for yourself, Mr. Crocker,” said she; “that is all of my contribution.  My uncle tells me you are the best lawyer in the country, and I am surprised that you are so slow in getting at motives.”

And I did attempt to solve it on my way back to Asquith.  The conclusion I settled to, everything weighed, was this:  that the Celebrity had become infatuated with Miss Thorn (I was far from blaming him for that) and had followed her first to Epsom and now to Asquith.  And he had chosen to come West incognito partly through the conceit which he admitted and gloried in, and partly because he believed his prominence sufficient to obtain for him an unpleasant notoriety if he continued long enough to track the same young lady about the country.  Hence he had taken the trouble to advertise a trip abroad to account for his absence.  Undoubtedly his previous conquests had been made more easily, for my second talk with Miss Thorn had put my mind at rest as to her having fallen a victim to his fascinations.  Her arrival at Mohair being delayed, the Celebrity had come nearly a month too soon, and in the interval that tendency of which he was the dupe still led him by the nose; he must needs make violent love to the most attractive girl on the ground,—­Miss Trevor.  Now that one still more attractive had arrived I was curious to see how he would steer between the two, for I made no doubt that matters had progressed rather far with Miss Trevor.  And in this I was not mistaken.

But his choice of the name of Charles Wrexell Allen bothered me considerably.  I finally decided that he had taken it because convenient, and because he believed Asquith to be more remote from the East than the Sandwich Islands.

Reaching the inn grounds, I climbed the hillside to a favorite haunt of mine, a huge boulder having a sloping back covered with soft turf.  Hence I could watch indifferently both lake and sky.  Presently, however, I was aroused by voices at the foot of the rock, and peering over the edge I discovered a kind of sewing-circle gathered there.  The foliage hid me completely.  I perceived the Celebrity perched upon the low branch of an apple-tree, and Miss Trevor below him, with two other girls, doing fancy-work.  I shall not attempt to defend the morality of my action, but I could not get away without discovery, and the knowledge that I had heard a part of their conversation might prove disquieting to them.

The Celebrity had just published a book, under the title of ’The Sybarites’, which was being everywhere discussed; and Asquith, where summer reading was general, came in for its share of the debate.  Why it was called The Sybarites I have never discovered.  I did not read the book because I was sick and tired of the author and his nonsense, but I imbibed, in spite of myself, something of the story and its moral from hearing it talked about.  The Celebrity himself had listened to arguments on the subject with great serenity, and was nothing loth to give his opinion when appealed to.  I realized at once that ‘The Sybarites’ was the present topic.