ack to town, or from seaside resorts to the mountains he passed
unnoticed. At Quebec he was one of the crowd of tourists come to see the
picturesque old town. At Rimouski he was lost among the trainful of people
from the Canadian maritime provinces taking the Atlantic steamer at a
convenient port. He lived through each minute in expectation of the law's
tap on his shoulder; but he acquired the habit of nonchalance. On
shipboard it was a relief to be able to shut himself up in his cabin--his
suite!--feigning sickness, but really allowing his taut nerves to relax,
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 alr