“I did know of one case of a husband starting off at random to find his runaway wife,” observed Breffny.
“As there's yet an hour to midnight, we have time for one of your stories.”
“I can tell this in five minutes. All I know of the story is the beginning. No one ever heard of the end. It was like this:
“When I lived in Glasgow, I knew a young fellow there who was timekeeper in a shipyard. He was a very quiet, pleasant boy, so bashful that I used to wonder how he had ever summoned the courage to propose to the pretty Scotch girl who was his wife. As I got to know more of the pair, I divined the secret. Although poor, he was of good Glasgow parentage, while the wife had been a country girl so eager to get to the city that she had courted him while he was on a visit to the village in which she had lived. She had merely used him as a means for finding the life for which she had longed.
“How much he really loved her was never suspected until he came home one evening and found that she had run away with the youngest son of one of the proprietors of the shipyard.
“He learned within a week that they had sailed for America. He packed a valise, took the money that he had saved, and started out.
“'But where are you going to look for them?' I asked him.
“'To America,' he said, turning toward me, his face drawn and gaunt with the grief that he had survived.
“'But America is a vast country.'
“'I will hunt till I find her.'