ppoint his hungry
appetite, and that is what Mr. Smith meant to do. His psychology,
unfortunately, was faulty. It was perhaps the poorest way of securing
Adelle's happiness in the end, as he might have foreseen if he had been
less conscientious and more human....

Shortly after delivering his blow, Mr. Smith took his hat and left the
studio without shaking hands with Archie, although he smiled frostily on
the trust company's ward and "hoped all would go well with her in her
new life." All the way back to his hotel he congratulated himself for
his dispatch, finesse, eloquence, and wisdom in handling a deplorable
and difficult situation. Yet it is hard to see just what he had
accomplished by crossing the ocean. He washed his hands of "the Clark
girl" before he left Paris for his return voyage, and, like so many
persons with whom the young heiress had dealings, never again actively
entered her life.

XXVI

When the studio door closed upon the emissary of the trust company, the
young couple looked at each other a little ruefully. Archie kicked over
a chair or two and expressed himself volubly, now that it was safe, upon
the priggishness and meanness of such folks as Mr. Solomon Smith. Adelle
might wish that he had expressed himself in these vigorous terms
earlier, when there could have been discussion and a chance of modifying
Mr. Smith's decision. But she realized how raw he was feeling from the
old gentleman's contempt and sweetly put her arms around her husband's
strong shoulders and kissed him tenderly.

"It won't be so bad, Archie," she said hopefully. "We'll get on somehow,
I expect, and it isn't forever--not two years." She could recall much
graver crises in life than being compelled to live for eighteen months
with an adored companion on seventy-five hundred dollars, and people
somehow survived them.

"It isn't just the money," Archie protested, a little shamed, but still
grumpy. "It's his rotten talk. A feller doesn't like being called all
sorts of names."

"Well, he's gone now and he won't come back," Adelle remarked
soothingly, with another effort to caress her young lord into amiability
and resignation to fate. That proved more difficult than usual: Archie
felt the sting of the older man's taunts, especially the horrid word
"adventurer" rankled in his subconsciousness. He saw himself reflected
in the opinion of other men,--at least of stodgy, middle-aged men like
Mr. Smith, who worked hard for wh