“He goes away for seven years, and he suddenly turns up filled with ambition and a purpose in life, something he had never dreamed of.  He’s been at Grenoble, where the Chiltern estate is, making improvements and preparing to settle down there.  And he’s actually getting ready to write a life of his father, the General—­that’s the most surprising thing!  They never met but to strike fire while the General was alive.  It appears that Jerry and Cecil Grainger and one or two other people have some of the old gentleman’s letters, and that’s the reason why Hugh’s come to Newport.  And the strangest thing about it, my dear,” added Mrs. Shorter, inconsequently, “is that I don’t think it’s a love affair.”

Honora laughed again.  It was the first time she had ever heard Mrs. Shorter attribute unusual human phenomena to any other source.  “He wrote Jerry that he was coming back to live on the estate,—­from England.  And he wasn’t there a week.  I can’t think where he’s seen any women—­that is,” Mrs. Shorter corrected herself hastily, “of his own class.  He’s been in the jungle—­India, Africa, Cores.  That was after Sally Harrington broke the engagement.  And I’m positive he’s not still in love with Sally.  She lunched with me yesterday, and I watched him.  Oh, I should have known it.  But Sally hasn’t got over it.  It wasn’t a grand passion with Hugh.  I don’t believe he’s ever had such a thing.  Not that he isn’t capable of it—­on the contrary, he’s one of the few men I can think of who is.”

At this point in the conversation Honora thought that her curiosity had gone far enough.

CHAPTER IV

THE VIKING

She was returning on foot from the bank in Thames Street, where she had deposited her legacy, when she met him who had been the subject of her conversation with Mrs. Shorter.  And the encounter seemed—­and was—­the most natural thing in the world.  She did not stop to ask herself why it was so fitting that the Viking should be a part of Vineland:  why his coming should have given it the one and final needful touch.  For that designation of Reginald Farwell’s had come back to her.  Despite the fact that Hugh Chiltern had with such apparent resolution set his face towards literature and the tillage of the land, it was as the Viking still that her imagination pictured him.  By these tokens we may perceive that this faculty of our heroine’s has been at work, and her canvas already sketched in.

Whether by design or accident he was at the leafy entrance of her lane she was not to know.  She spied him standing there; and in her leisurely approach a strange conceit of reincarnation possessed her, and she smiled at the contrast thus summoned up.  Despite the jingling harnesses of Bellevue Avenue and the background of Mr. Chamberlin’s palace wall; despite the straw hat and white trousers and blue double-breasted serge coat in which he was conventionally arrayed, he was the sea fighter still—­of all the ages.  M. Vipsanius Agrippa, who had won an empire for Augustus, had just such a head.