The next morning when they awoke in the Eclair Hotel, which still remained B----'s best hostelry, where they had consoled themselves by taking an expensive suite and ordering a good dinner, they found that their arrival in America was not unheralded. The reporter had not been idle. His description of Archie was unkind, and his satirical report of the couple's sayings and doings was unfriendly. He had somehow discovered Adelle's connection with Clark's Field, the story of which in a much garbled form he gave to the public and incidentally doubled the size of her fortune,--"drawn from one of the most unblushing pieces of real estate promotion this State has ever seen." Altogether it was the kind of article to make the conservative gentlemen of the Washington Trust Company very unhappy. When they read it they wished again that they had never seen Adelle. Other papers took up the scent of the "Morning Herald," and for a week Archie and Adelle were thoroughly introduced to the American people as an idle pair, of immense inherited wealth, who had failed in their attempt to defraud the custom house of a few thousand dollars. This affair kept them busy for the better part of a week, and was finally settled without prosecution when the collector became convinced that no serious wrong had been plotted by Archie and Adelle. He gave them both a little lecture, which they received in a humbler frame of mind than they had shown at the dock. Archie rather enjoyed the newspaper notoriety that his marriage to the heiress of Clark's Field was bringing him. He entertained the reporters affably at the hotel bar, and established a reputation for not being a "snob," though so much of a "swell." In fact he was a much less uncouth specimen than when Adelle had first encountered him in the Paris studio. A year and a half of ease and petting had served to smooth off those more obvious roughnesses that had caused Irene Paul to describe him as a "bounder." He was fashionably dressed according to the Anglo-French style, and fortunately did not affect soft shirts or flowing ties or eccentric head-gear, or any other of the traditional marks of the artist. Lounging in the luxurious hotel corridor, he looked like any well-to-do young American of twenty-seven or eight. His bright red hair and small waxed mustache, and his habit of dangling a small cane, perhaps, were the only distinguishing marks about him. After the customs case had been disposed of, Archie found time hanging on his hands. Adelle was occupied with the trust company and all the formalities she had to go through with before she could actually lay her hands upon her fortune. Archie read the lighter magazines and loafed about the streets of B----, peering up through his glasses at the lofty buildings, and imbibing more cocktails and other varieties of American stimulants than was good for him. XXVIII