XXII
PATCH-WORK
"Come, give us a taste of your quality."
Hamlet.
STARTING with the assumption that Mr. Clavering in his conversation of the morning had been giving me, with more or less accuracy, a detailed account of his own experience and position regarding Eleanore Leavenworth, I asked myself what particular facts it would be necessary for me to establish in order to prove the truth of this assumption, and found them to be:
I. That Mr. Clavering had not only been in this country at the time designated, but that he had been located for some little time at a watering-place in New York State.
II. That this watering-place should correspond to the one in which Miss Eleanore Leavenworth was staying at the same time.
III. That they had been seen while there to hold more or less communication.
IV. That they had both been absent from town, at some one time, long enough to have gone through the ceremony of marriage at a point twenty miles or so away.
V. That a Methodist clergyman, who has since died, lived at that time within a radius of twenty miles of said watering-place.
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