pon Adelle to undo what
she had done, and he had to content himself with the shrewd reflection
that it was probably not legally binding and could be broken when
opportunity offered.

In this affair Adelle displayed an unexpected caution by her willingness
to let the trust company remain guardian of her magic lamp for the
present. She had a woman's instinctive confidence in an institution,
especially in one which years of use had made familiar to her. Archie,
she felt justly, must content himself with their income, which would be
more than two hundred thousand a year. That should satisfy their
immediate wants after the eighteen months of bread-and-butter probation.
And after all it was her own money, as the trust officers had said to
her again and again. This, however, she did not repeat to Archie. She
soothed his irritated pride in other ways, and in the end a fairly
contented and harmonious couple were whirled westward in the track of
the setting sun to that more golden shore of our continent, where other
fate awaited them.

XXXI

After a brief visit at the Santa Rosa vineyard, where oddly enough
Adelle seemed to feel more at home than Archie, they went to Bellevue to
attend the famous Paul wedding. Here Irene Paul, now an "Honorable Mrs."
George Pointer, entertained them, both Adelle and Irene apparently
forgetting their old grudges. Arm about waist they went lovingly up the
grand staircase of the old Paul mansion to Adelle's rooms, babbling
about school days, Pussy Comstock, and the other girls of her famous
"family." Irene even looked with favor upon Archie in his developed
condition of a rich woman's husband. Adelle reflected complacently that
he was quite as presentable as a man as the young Englishman Irene had
married. All you had to do to succeed, in marriage as in other things,
was to do what you wanted and make the world accept you and your acts.
And she honestly admired the tall blonde Irene, who had bloomed under
the influences of matrimony into something suggestively
English--high-colored, stately, emphatic. She liked the rambling ugly
mansion built in the eighties after Hermann Paul's success with
railroads, in the best mansard style of the day, and never touched
since. The grounds which had been extensively planted by the railroad
man were now covered with a luxuriant growth of exotic trees that
completely hid the house and afforded only peeps of the distant bay.
California, with its pungent