I glanced at the rest of it:  a history of the well-established company followed, with all that Mr. Allen had done for it.  The picture, by the way, had been obtained from the St. Paul agent of the bicycle.  After doing due credit to the treasurer’s abilities as a hustler there followed a summary of his character, hitherto without reproach; but his tastes were expensive ones.  Mr. Allen’s tendency to extravagance had been noticed by the members of the Miles Standish Company, and some of the older directors had on occasions remonstrated with him.  But he had been too valuable a man to let go, and it seems as treasurer he was trusted implicitly.  He was said to have more clothes than any man in Boston.

I am used to thinking quickly, and by the time I had read this I had an idea.

“What in hell do you make of that, Crocker?” cried my client, eyeing me closely and repeating the question again and again, as was his wont when agitated.

“It is certainly plain enough,” I replied, “but I should like to talk to you before you decide to hand him over to the authorities.”

I thought I knew Mr. Cooke, and I was not mistaken.

“Authorities!” he roared.  “Damn the authorities!  There’s my yacht, and there’s the Canadian border.”  And he pointed to the north.

The others were pressing around us by this time, and had caught the significant words which Mr. Cooke had uttered.  I imagine that if my client had stopped to think twice, which of course is a preposterous condition, he would have confided his discovery only to Farrar and to me.  It was now out of the question to keep it from the rest of the party, and Mr. Trevor got the headlines over my shoulder.  I handed him the sheet.

“Read it, Mr. Trevor,” said Mrs. Cooke.

Mr. Trevor, in a somewhat unsteady voice, read the headlines and began the column, and they followed breathless with astonishment and agitation.  Once or twice the senator paused to frown upon the Celebrity with a terrible sternness, thus directing all other eyes to him.  His demeanor was a study in itself.  It may be surmised, from what I have said of him, that there was a strain of the actor in his composition; and I am prepared to make an affidavit that, secure in the knowledge that he had witnesses present to attest his identity, he hugely enjoyed the sensation he was creating.  That he looked forward with a profound pleasure to the stir which the disclosure that he was the author of The Sybarites would make.  His face wore a beatific smile.

As Mr. Trevor continued, his voice became firmer and his manner more majestic.  It was a task distinctly to his taste, and one might have thought he was reading the sentence of a Hastings.  I was standing next to his daughter.  The look of astonishment, perhaps of horror, which I had seen on her face when her father first began to read had now faded into something akin to wickedness.  Did she wink?  I can’t say, never before having had a young woman wink at me.  But the next moment her vinaigrette was rolling down the bank towards the brook, and I was after it.  I heard her close behind me.  She must have read my intentions by a kind of mental telepathy.