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Updated: June 23, 2025
Before making their offer, for six months, the Farrells had had me "looked up," but, without knowing anything of them, after a talk of ten minutes I had turned them down. "Was that," he asked, "intelligent? Was it fair to the Farrells?" He continued to tempt me. "They told you to think it over," he persisted. "Very well, then, think it over at Fairharbor!
In a week he would return to Fairharbor when he hoped to receive a favorable answer. In the meantime he enclosed a letter to his housekeeper. "Don't take anything for granted," he urged, "but go to Fairharbor and present this letter. See the place for yourself. Spend the week there and act like you were the owner. My housekeeper has orders to take her orders from you.
For the next three weeks the Farrells will be at Cape May. The coast is clear. Go to Fairharbor as somebody else and be your own detective. Find out if what they tell you is true. Get inside information. Get inside Harbor Castle. Count the eighteen bedrooms and try the beds. Never mind the art gallery, but make sure there is a wine cellar. You can't start too soon, and I WILL GO WITH YOU!"
I felt as a detective. I had acquired important information. The mate, a man of judgment, preferred Fairharbor to New York. Also, to living in Harbor Castle, he preferred going to jail. The boat on which I had arrived was listed to start back at six the same evening on her return trip to New York. So, at the office of the line I checked my valise, and set forth to explore New Bedford.
Farrell had spoken was certainly an ideal work-shop, the tennis-courts made those at the Newport Casino look like a ploughed field, and the swimming-pool, guarded by white pillars and overhung with grape-vines, was a cool and refreshing picture. As, hot and perspiring, I trudged back through Fairharbor, the memory of these haunted me. That they also tempted me, it is impossible to deny.
The mate had told me that for what he had rented a flat in New York he had secured one of these charming old world homes. And as I passed them I began to pick out the one in which when I retired from the world I would settle down. This time I made no alterations. How much the near presence of Miss Briggs had to do with my determination to settle down in Fairharbor, I cannot now remember.
As one book reviewer put it, "To expect the public of to-day to read the novels of Fletcher Farrell is like asking people to give up the bunny hug and go back to the lancers." And, to make it harder, I was only thirty years old. It was at this depressing period in my career that I received a letter from Fairharbor, Massachusetts, signed Fletcher Farrell.
I had no more than reached my apartment, than a messenger-boy arrived with an envelope. It contained a ticket for a round trip on the New Bedford Line boat leaving that afternoon, a ticket for a stateroom, and a note from Curtis Spencer. The latter read: "The boat leaves at six to-night. You arrive at New Bedford seven to-morrow morning. New Bedford and Fairharbor are connected by a bridge.
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