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Holcombe could not help but smile at the absurdity of it. It was so like what he would have expected of Meakim and his class to give every office-holder his full title. “No, Mr. Police Commissioner,” he answered, grimly, and nodding to his boatmen, pushed his way after them and his trunks along the pier.

Meakim was waiting for him as he left the custom-house. He touched his hat, and bent the whole upper part of his fat body in an awkward bow. “Excuse me, Mr. District Attorney,” he began.

“Oh, drop that, will you?” snapped Holcombe. “Now, what is it you want, Meakim?”

“I was only going to say,” answered the fugitive, with some offended dignity, “that as I’ve been here longer than you, I could perhaps give you pointers about the hotels. I’ve tried ’em all, and they’re no good, but the Albion’s the best.”

“Thank you, I’m sure,” said Holcombe. “But I have been told to go to the Isabella.”

“Well, that’s pretty good, too,” Meakim answered, “if you don’t mind the tables. They keep you awake most of the night, though, and–“

“The tables? I beg your pardon,” said Holcombe, stiffly.

“Not the eatin’ tables; the roulette tables,” corrected Meakim. “Of course,” he continued, grinning, “if you’re fond of the game, Mr. Holcombe, it’s handy having them in the same house, but I can steer you against a better one back of the French Consulate. Those at the Hotel Isabella’s crooked.”

Holcombe stopped uncertainly. “I don’t know just what to do,” he said. “I think I shall wait until I can see our consul here.”

“Oh, he’ll send you to the Isabella,” said Meakim, cheerfully. “He gets two hundred dollars a week for protecting the proprietor, so he naturally caps for the house.”

Holcombe opened his mouth to express himself, but closed it again, and then asked, with some misgivings, of the hotel of which Meakim had first spoken.

“Oh, the Albion. Most all the swells go there. It’s English, and they cook you a good beefsteak. And the boys generally drop in for table d’hote. You see, that’s the worst of this place, Mr. Holcombe; there’s nowhere to go evenings–no club-rooms nor theatre nor nothing; only the smoking-room of the hotel or that gambling-house; and they spring a double naught on you if there’s more than a dollar up.”

Holcombe still stood irresolute, his porters eying him from under their burdens, and the runners from the different hotels plucking at his sleeve.

“There’s some very good people at the Albion,” urged the Police Commissioner, “and three or four of ’em’s New-Yorkers. There’s the Morrises and Ropes, the Consul-General, and Lloyd Carroll–“

“Lloyd Carroll!” exclaimed Holcombe.

“Yes,” said Meakim, with a smile, “he’s here.” He looked at Holcombe curiously for a moment, and then exclaimed, with a laugh of intelligence, “Why, sure enough, you were Mr. Thatcher’s lawyer in that case, weren’t you? It was you got him his divorce?”

Holcombe nodded.

“Carroll was the man that made it possible, wasn’t he?”

Holcombe chafed under this catechism. “He was one of a dozen, I believe,” he said; but as he moved away he turned and asked: “And Mrs. Thatcher. What has become of her?”

The Police Commissioner did not answer at once, but glanced up at Holcombe from under his half-shut eyes with a look in which there was a mixture of curiosity and of amusement. “You don’t mean to say, Mr. Holcombe,” he began, slowly, with the patronage of the older man and with a touch of remonstrance in his tone, “that you’re still with the husband in that case?”

Holcombe looked coldly over Mr. Meakim’s head. “I have only a purely professional interest in any one of them,” he said. “They struck me as a particularly nasty lot. Good-morning, sir.”

“Well,” Meakim called after him, “you needn’t see nothing of them if you don’t want to. You can get rooms to yourself.”

Holcombe did get rooms to himself, with a balcony overlooking the bay, and arranged with the proprietor of the Albion to have his dinner served at a separate table. As others had done this before, no one regarded it as an affront upon his society, and several people in the hotel made advances to him, which he received politely but coldly. For the first week of his visit the town interested him greatly, increasing its hold upon him unconsciously to himself. He was restless and curious to see it all, and rushed his guide from one of the few show-places to the next with an energy which left that fat Oriental panting.