“Your face glows plain in an evening star, Ere the moon rides high and cold, And memories tune with the summer night On a chord that’s rare and old——” A face in a star! Whose face? He thought for a time he could almost discern. Fancy led him to invent a face which should approximate his ideal. What was his ideal woman’s face? If he were a great painter and would put on canvas the features of his Dream Girl, what manner and type of face would he paint? The boat swayed on in the starlit dark. Above it, lights of God looked down their mighty passwords over the waters. Stygian smoke furled from great funnels and dropped a billowy screen across their phosphorescent wake. A happy laugh floated out a sharply defined door from the ladies lounging room up forward. A face in a star! Whose face? Nathan thought of a woman he had seen in Springfield one night—the night of the Harvard-Pennsylvania boat race—before he had gone to his hotel to get that awful wire about little Mary’s going away—a girl sitting across a snowy-white table from a man in dinner clothes,—a girl raised just above him—with features he had never quite forgotten, they were so fine and tender and cameo-rare. If he were a painter, he believed he would try to sketch that woman’s face as something very like his Dream Girl. He wondered who she had been—her name? The fellow’s wife probably. Strange how things stick in the back of a man’s mind at times. A face in a star, indeed! Happily, new scenes and clean, free horizons were taking pressure from head and brain. The world with which he had battled was drawing off in increasingly better perspective. He was humbly thankful. He awoke one morning to find the engine’s heart-throb stopped and the vessel strangely quiet. Glancing out his stateroom porthole in the hush of dawn, he beheld a mountain sky line weirdly close. They had approached Hawaii and Honolulu during the night. Dense, tropical vapor clouded the mauve mountain summits. The city was almost hidden in foliage. A molten sun came up while he was breakfasting. About ten o’clock he went ashore. The narrow, low-roofed streets with queer souvenir shops; the native, comic-opera policemen at intersections of traffic; picturesque brown men with hatbands and collars wreathed with flowers; quaint Japanese women with brilliant sun-shades,—among them Nathan felt like a schoolboy off on his first vacation. II