what?" I inquired.

"I'm afraid it's too late to help you. We heard just before leaving the
place that she was to marry some man at home. It hadn't been formally
announced, but I think it was quite definite."

I suppose he said good-night and that I replied. I don't remember his
leaving the stateroom. I recall standing some time later alone on the
deck and seeing a white-clad officer tramping the bridge. His noiseless
feet seemed to be treading upon me. The one honeymoon couple on our
passenger-list passed and halted to comment on the rare quality of the
air and the splendid softness of the stars. The little bride laughed
delightedly. "Oh, Mr. Deprayne," she enthused, "it was under skies like
this that Stevenson wrote,

"'The world is so full of a number of things,
That I feel we should all be as happy as kings.'"

I smiled. "Yes," I murmured, "a number of things. Possibly too many
things."

There was running through my memory a passage from the diary written by
the unknown girl. It was one of those passages that had stuck in my
memory through the shipwreck and the island days, a note of optimism
which I had liked, partly because it was rather too imaginative to be
accepted as fact. Now it mocked me.

"It's not just to-day's wonderful things that make life fair," she had
written, "but it's knowing that there is to be a to-morrow, and that
that same to-morrow will be lovelier than to-day. I know (I can't say
why unless it's just that some voice keeps singing it to my heart), that
some day he will come walking into my life as into a place where he has
the right to be and our lives will after that be one life. That is the
to-morrow I am waiting for."

CHAPTER XIV

THE "ASH-TRASH LADY"

But when we parted at Honolulu the name was still eluding Keller's
memory and I had to continue on my way uninformed.

I was at first all for breaking my journey and remaining with him until
some flash of memory should bring back the one word I needed, but he
pointed out to me that little would be gained by this course. I think he
was, in fact, so sensitive as to the mental quirk which had survived his
attack that the idea of a man's shadowing him, waiting for him to
remember, was unwelcome and would have taxed his self-respect. I felt
bound to regard his whim, inasmuch as he promised that if I would wait a
while, two or three weeks at the most, he would arm me with information.
Even if his memory continued to p