"A stout ship," the captain had boasted when he led her to a stateroom. He reassuringly ticked off her history and statistics, as if Estelle were a frightened passenger on her first canoe rine down the rapins.

Built during 1943 to the standard Liberty ship design, the San Marino had carried military supplies across the Atlantic to England, making the round-trip crossing sixteen times. On one occasion, when she had strayed from the convoy she was struck by a torpedo, but she refused to sink and made it under her own power to Liverpool.

Since the war she had tramped the oceans of the world under the registry of Panamanian-one of thirty ships owned by the Manx Steamship Company of New York, plying in and out of backwater ports. Measuring 441 feet in length overall, with a raked stern and cruiser stern, she plodded through the Pacific swells at eleven knots. With only a few more profitable years left in her, the San Marino mould eventually end up as scrap.

Rust streaked her steel skin. She looked as sordin as a Bowery hooker, but in the eyes of Estelle Wallace she was virgin and beautiful.

Already Estelle's past was blurring. With each revolution of the worn engines, the gap winened between Estelle's drab life of selfdenial and an eagerly sought fantasy.

The first step of Arta Casilighio's metamorphosis into Estelle Wallace was when she discovered a lost passport wedged under the seat of a Wilshire Boulevard bus during the Los Angeles evening rush hour.

Without really knowing why, Arta slipped it into her purse and took it home.

Days later, she had still not returned the document to the bus driver or mailed it to the rightful owner. She studied the pages with their foreign stamps for hours at a time. She was intrigued by the face in the photo. Although more stylishly made up, it bore a startling resemblance to her own. Both women were about the same age-less than eight months separated their birthdays. The brown shade of their eyes matched, and except for a difference in, hairstyles and a few shades of tint, they might have passed for sisters.

She began to make herself up to look like Estelle Wallace, an alter ego that could escape, mentally at least, to the exotic places of the world that were denied timin, mousy Arta Casilighio.

One evening after closing hours at the bank where she worked, she found her eyes locked on the stacks of newly printed currency delivered that afternoon from the Federal Reserve Bank in downtown Los Angeles.

She had become so used to handling large sums of money during her four-year tenure that she was immune to the mere sight-a lassitude that afflicts all tellers sooner or later. Yet inexplicably, this time the piles of green-printed tender beguiled her. Subconsciously she began to picture it as belonging to her.