“I heard them call him Mr. Strange—­”

“Odd that was, wasn’t it?  But it isn’t such a very uncommon name.  I’ve met other Stranges—­”

“Oh yes.  So have I.”

“Well, who do you think he is?  Why, he’s Stephens and Jarrott’s new man in New York.  He’s taken Jenkins’s place.  You remember Jenkins, don’t you?  That little man with a lisp.  I had a nice long chat with him—­Strange, I mean.  He tells me he’s a New-Yorker by birth, but that he went out to the Argentine after his father failed in business.  Well, he won’t fail in business, I bet a penny.  He’s tremendously enthusiastic over the Argentine, too.  Showed he had his head put on the right way when he went there.  Wonderful country—­the United States of South America some people call it.  We’re missing our opportunities out there.  Great volume of trade flowing to Europe of which we had almost the monopoly at one time.  I had a nice long chat with him.”

Her tired emotions received a new surprise as Wayne’s words directed her thoughts to the morning when she had made to Ford the first suggestion of the Argentine.  She had not precisely forgotten it; she had only thought it of too little importance to dwell on.  She remembered that she had considered the idea practical till she had expressed it, but that his opposition had seemed to turn it into the impossible.  She had never supposed that he might have acted on it—­not any more than she had expected him to retain her father’s name once he had reached a place of safety.  In spite of the suddenness with which her dreams regarding him had been dispelled, it gave her a thrill of satisfaction to think that the word which, in a sense, had created him had been hers.  To her fierce jealousy, with which her pride was wrestling even now, there was a measure of comfort in the knowledge that he could never be quite free from her, that his existence was rooted in her own.

“Queenie Jarrott tells me,” Wayne meandered on, “that her brother thinks very highly of this young man.  It seems that his business abilities are quite remarkable, and they fancy he looks like Henry—­the eldest of the boys who died.  It’s extraordinary how his voice reminds me of some one—­don’t know who.  It might be—­But then again—­”

“His voice is like a thousand other voices,” she thought it well to say, “just as he looks like a thousand other men.  He’s one of those rather tall, rather good-looking, rather well-dressed youngish men—­not really young—­of whom you’ll pass twenty within a mile any day in Fifth Avenue, and who are as thick as soldiers on a battle-field at the lower end of Broadway.”

* * * * *