nger on board the Royal Mail Steam Packet _Parana_, bound for Buenos
Aires--thus fulfilling, almost unexpectedly to himself, the suggestion
made by the girl in the Adirondack cabin, whose star, as he began to
believe, must rule his fate.

He thought of her now and then, but always with the same curious sense of
remoteness--or unreality, as of a figure seen in a dream. Were it not for
the substantial tokens of her actuality he possessed she would have seemed
to him like the heroine of a play. He would have reproached himself for
disloyalty if the intensity of each minute as he had to meet it had not
been an excuse for him. The time would come when the pressure of the
instant would be less great, and he should be able to get back the emotion
with which he left her. Perhaps if she had been "his type of girl," her
image would not have faded so quickly.

There was but one thing for which he was not grateful to her. She had
fixed the name of Herbert Strange upon him in such a way that he was
unable to shake it off. His own first name was the unobjectionable
monosyllable John--though he had always been known by his less familiar
middle name, Norrie--and as John Ford he could have faced the world with a
certain amount of bluff. He meant to begin the attempt immediately on
reaching London, but the difficulty of appearing in a hotel under one name
while everything he brought with him bore another was patent to him at
once. Similarly, he could not receive the correspondence incidental to his
outfit and his passage under the name of Ford in a house where he was
known as Strange. Having applied for his passage as Strange, he knew it
would create comment if he asked to be put down in the books as Ford. Do
what he would he was obliged to appear on the printed list of second-cabin
passengers as Herbert Strange, and he had made at least one acquaintance
who would expect to call him so after they reached land.

This was a little, clean-shaven man, in the neighborhood of sixty, always
dressed at sea as he probably dressed on shore. He wore nothing but black,
with a white shirt and a ready-made black bow-tie. He might have been a
butler, an elderly valet, or a member of some discreet religious order in
street costume. Ford had heard a flippant young Frenchman speak of him as
an "ancien curA(C), qui a fait quelque bA