“I see,” exclaimed Ford.  “Your husband is a bookmaker.  But in London he is a promoter of companies.”

“So my friend tells me,” said Mrs. Ashton.  “She’s just got back from London.  Her husband told her that Harry, my husband, was always at the American bar in the Cecil or at the Salisbury or the Savoy.”  The girl shook her head.  “But a woman can’t go looking for a man there,” she protested.  “That’s why I thought you—­”

“That’ll be all right,” Ford assured her hurriedly.  “It’s a coincidence, but it happens that my own work takes me to these hotels, and if your husband is there I will find him.”  He returned the photographs.

“Hadn’t you better keep one?” she asked.

“I won’t forget him,” said the reporter.  “Besides”—­he turned his eyes toward the doctor and, as though thinking aloud, said—­“he may have grown a beard.”

There was a pause.

The eyes of the woman grew troubled.  Her lips pressed together as though in a sudden access of pain.

“And he may,” Ford continued, “have changed his name.”

As though fearful, if she spoke, the tears would fall, the girl nodded her head stiffly.

Having learned what he wanted to know Ford applied to the wound a soothing ointment of promises and encouragement.

“He’s as good as found,” he protested.  “You will see him in a day, two days after you land.”

The girl’s eyes opened happily.  She clasped her hands together and raised them.

“You will try?” she begged.  “You will find him for me”—­she corrected herself eagerly—­“for me and the baby?”

The loose sleeves of the kimono fell back to her shoulders showing the white arms; the eyes raised to Ford were glistening with tears.

“Of course I will find him,” growled the reporter.

He freed himself from the appeal in the eyes of the young mother and left the cabin.  The doctor followed.  He was bubbling over with enthusiasm.

“That was fine!” he cried.  “You said just the right thing.  There will be no collapse now.”

His satisfaction was swept away in a burst of disgust.

“The blackguard!” he protested.  “To desert a wife as young as that and as pretty as that.”

“So I have been thinking,” said the reporter.  “I guess,” he added gravely, “what is going to happen is that before I find her husband I will have got to know him pretty well.”

Apparently, young Mrs. Ashton believed everything would come to pass just as Ford promised it would and as he chose to order it; for the next day, with a color not born of fever in her cheeks and courage in her eyes, she joined Ford and the doctor at the luncheon-table.  Her attention was concentrated on the younger man.  In him she saw the one person who could bring her husband to her.

“She acts,” growled the doctor later in the smoking-room, “as though she was afraid you were going to back out of your promise and jump overboard.”