r" with
Count Zornec, the Hungarian referred to above, who was temporarily
exiled to his remote estate. Indeed, she became the means of furthering
this passion and speeding it to its destined end in matrimony, which has
to do with a subsequent part of our tale....

To return to the wanderings of Adelle and Archie, in the Easter holidays
they left Munich for Switzerland for the winter sports, and in the
spring Archie conceiving the idea that he wanted to do Dutch landscape,
they went to Holland for a few weeks. That summer they rented a small
villa along the Bay of Biscay and had Sadie Paul and her Count as their
guests for a time. The second winter of their marriage they spent in
Paris, and by this time were rather hard-pressed for ready money, as
neither had relaxed in wanting things and Adelle especially still had
the habit of buying whatever attracted her attention,--bright-colored
stuffs, jewels, and useless odds and ends of bric-a-brac, with the idea
that sometime they should want to establish themselves permanently
somewhere and purchases would all come in usefully. It was much as a
bird gathers sticks, straws, and bright-colored threads, but in Adelle
it was an expensive instinct. Towards the end of their period of
probation, they had to get aid from money-lenders, to whom Sadie Paul
introduced them. Adelle did not find it difficult to raise money on her
expectations, at a stiff rate of interest, and thus the object of the
Puritan Mr. Smith was defeated. It would have pained his thrifty
banker's soul had he known that the trust company's ward was gayly
paying ten and fifteen percent for "temporary accommodation," while her
own funds were barely earning five per cent in the careful investments
of the trust company! When Adelle finally got hold of her fortune, a
goodly sum had to be paid over to settle the claims of these obliging
money-lenders....

Of the quarrels, big and little, that the young couple had these first
months it is useless to speak. Thus far they were neither excessively
severe nor dangerously frequent--no worse, perhaps, than the average
idle couple must create in love's readjustment to prosaic fact. Adelle
no longer believed that her Archie would be the great painter that she
had once fondly dreamed of helping him to become. He was too lazy and
fond of good things to eat and drink and other sensual rewards of life
to become distinguished in anything, unless perchance he were well
starved into d