as he watched first the outlines of the Laurentides, and then the shores of Anticosti, and lastly the iron-black coast of Labrador, follow each other below the horizon.  Two or three appearances at table gave him confidence that he had nothing to fear.  By degrees he allowed himself to walk up and down the deck, where it was a queer sensation to feel that the long row of eyes must of necessity be fixed upon him.  The mere fact that he was wearing another man’s clothes—­clothes he had found in the cabin trunk that had come on board for him—­produced a shyness scarcely mitigated by the knowledge that he was far from looking grotesque.

Little by little he plucked up courage to enter the smoking-room where the tacit, matter-of-course welcome of his own sex seemed to him like extraordinary affability.  An occasional word from a neighbor, or an invitation to “take a hand at poker,” or to “have a cocktail,” was like an assurance to a man who fancies himself dead that he really is alive.  He joined in no conversations and met no advances, but from the possibilities of doing so he would go back to his cabin smiling.

The nearest approach to pleasure he allowed himself was to sit in a corner and listen to the talk of his fellow-men.  It was sometimes amusing, but oftener stupid; it turned largely on food, with irrelevant interludes on business.  It never went beyond the range of topics possible to the American or Canadian merchants, professional men, politicians, and saloon-keepers, who form the rank and file of smoking-room society on any Atlantic liner; but the Delphic worshipper never listened to Apollo’s oracle with a more rapt devotion than Ford to this intercommunion of souls.

It was in this way that he chanced one day to hear a man speaking of the Argentine.  The remarks were casual, choppy, and without importance, but the speaker evidently knew the ground.  Ford had already noticed him, because they occupied adjoining steamer-chairs—­a tall, sallow Englishman of the ineffectual type, with sagging shoulders, a drooping mustache, and furtive eyes.  Ford had scarcely thought of the Argentine since the girl in the cabin had mentioned it—–­ now ten or twelve days ago; but the necessity of having an objective point, and one sufficiently distant turned his mind again in that direction.

“Did I hear you speaking yesterday of Buenos Aires?” he ventured to ask, on the next occasion when he found himself seated beside his neighbor on deck.

The Englishman drew his brier-root pipe from his mouth, glanced sidewise from the magazine he was reading, and jerked his head in assent.

“What kind of place did it seem to you?”

“Jolly rotten.”

Pondering this reply, Ford might have lost courage to speak again had he not caught the eye of the Englishman’s wife as she leaned forward and peeped at him across her husband’s brier-root.  There was something in her starry glance—­an invitation, or an incitement—­that impelled him to continue.