“Isn’t it the very irony of fate?” he said to his wife when he found her in their room with a cup of the same mud he had been drinking, and reported the facts to her.

“Irony?” she said, with all the excitement he could have imagined or desired.  “Nothing of the kind.  It’s a leading, if ever there was one.  It will be the easiest thing in the world to find Burnamy.  And out there she can sit on her steps!”

He slowly groped his way to her meaning, through the hypothesis of Burnamy’s reconciliation and marriage with Agatha Triscoe, and their settlement in Major Eltwin’s town under social conditions that implied a habit of spending the summer evenings on their front porch.  While he was doing this she showered him with questions and conjectures and requisitions in which nothing but the impossibility of going ashore saved him from the instant devotion of all his energies to a world-wide, inquiry into Burnamy’s whereabouts.

The next morning he was up before Major Eltwin got out, and found the second-cabin passengers free of the first-cabin promenade at an hour when their superiors were not using it.  As he watched these inferiors, decent-looking, well-clad men and women, enjoying their privilege with a furtive air, and with stolen glances at him, he asked himself in what sort he was their superior, till the inquiry grew painful.  Then he rose from his chair, and made his way to the place where the material barrier between them was lifted, and interested himself in a few of them who seemed too proud to avail themselves of his society on the terms made.  A figure seized his attention with a sudden fascination of conjecture and rejection:  the figure of a tall young man who came out on the promenade and without looking round, walked swiftly away to the bow of the ship, and stood there, looking down at the water in an attitude which was bewilderingly familiar.  His movement, his posture, his dress, even, was that of Burnamy, and March, after a first flush of pleasure, felt a sickening repulsion in the notion of his presence.  It would have been such a cheap performance on the part of life, which has all sorts of chances at command, and need not descend to the poor tricks of second-rate fiction; and he accused Burnamy of a complicity in the bad taste of the affair, though he realized, when he reflected, that if it were really Burnamy he must have sailed in as much unconsciousness of the Triscoes as he himself had done.  He had probably got out of money and had hurried home while he had still enough to pay the second-cabin fare on the first boat back.  Clearly he was not to blame, but life was to blame for such a shabby device; and March felt this so keenly that he wished to turn from the situation, and have nothing to do with it.  He kept moving toward him, drawn by the fatal attraction, and at a few paces’ distance the young man whirled about and showed him the face of a stranger.