praises. Mrs. Cooke returned the calls. She took tea on the inn
veranda, and drove Mrs. Short around Mohair in her victoria.
Mr. Cooke being seen only on rare and fleeting occasions, there gradually
got abroad a most curious misconception of that gentleman's character,
while over his personality floated a mist of legend which the Celebrity
took good care not to dispel. Farrar, who despised nonsense, was
ironical and non-committal when appealed to, and certainly I betrayed
none of my client's attributes. Hence it came that Asquith, before the
house-warming, knew as little about Farquhar Fenelon Cooke, the man, as
the nineteenth century knows about William Shakespeare, and was every
whit as curious. Like Shakespeare, Mr. Cooke was judged by his works,
and from these he was generally conceded to be an illiterate and
indifferent person of barbarous tastes and a mania for horses. He was
further described as ungentlemanly by a brace of spinsters who had been
within earshot on the veranda the morning he had abused the Asquith
roads, but their evidence was not looked upon as damning. That Mr. Cooke
would appear at the cotillon never entered any one's head.

Thus it was, for a fortnight, Mr. Cooke maintained a most rigid
seclusion. Would that he had discovered in the shroud of mystery the
cloak of fame!