Ford never spoke to them again, but he meditated on their words, finding himself at the end of twenty-four hours in possession of a new light.  “I’ve got to use my bloomin’ mind.”  The words seemed to offer him the clew to life.  It was the answer to the question, “What should I do there?” which positively asked itself, whenever he thought of seeking a refuge in this country or in that.  It came as a discovery that within himself was the power that would enable him to make the best of any country, and the country to make the best of him.

He could hardly have explained how his decision to try Argentina had become fixed.  Until he saw whether or not he should get successfully ashore at Liverpool there was a paralysis of all mental effort; but once on the train for London his plans appeared before him already formed.  The country where few questions were asked and the past had no importance was clearly the place for him.  Within a fortnight he was a second-class passenger 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.