“The final argument for my theory,” declared Honora.

“On the contrary,” he maintained, smiling, “it proves there is always one woman for every man—­if he cars find her.  If this man had lived in modern times, he would probably have changed from a Captain Kidd into a useful citizen of the kind you once said you admired.”

“Is a woman necessary,” she asked, “for the transformation?”

He looked at her so intently that she blushed to the hair clustering at her temples.  She had not meant that her badinage should go so deep.

“It was not a woman,” he said slowly, “that brought me back to America.”

“Oh,” she exclaimed, suffused, “I hope you won’t think that curiosity” —­and got no farther.

He was silent a moment, and when she ventured to glance up at him one of those enigmatical changes had taken place.  He was looking at her gravely, though intently, and the Viking had disappeared.

“I wanted you to know,” he answered.  “You must have heard more or less about me.  People talk.  Naturally these things haven’t been repeated to me, but I dare say many of them are true.  I haven’t been a saint, and I don’t pretend to be now.  I’ve never taken the trouble to deceive any one.  And I’ve never cared, I’m sorry to say, what was said.  But I’d like you to believe that when I agreed with with the sentiments you expressed the first time I saw you, I was sincere.  And I am still sincere.”

“Indeed, I do believe it!” cried Honora.

His face lighted.

“You seemed different from the other women I had known—­of my generation, at least,” he went on steadily.  “None of them could have spoken as you did.  I had just landed that morning, and I should have gone direct to Grenoble, but there was some necessary business to be attended to in New York.  I didn’t want to go to Bessie’s dinner, but she insisted.  She was short of a man.  I went.  I sat next to you, and you interpreted my mind.  It seemed too extraordinary not to have had a significance.”

Honora did not reply.  She felt instinctively that he was a man who was not wont ordinarily to talk about his affairs.  Beneath his speech was an undercurrent—­or undertow, perhaps—­carrying her swiftly, easily, helpless into the deep waters of intimacy.  For the moment she let herself go without a struggle.  Her silence was of a breathless quality which he must have felt.

“And I am going to tell you why I came home,” he said.  “I have spoken of it to nobody, but I wish you to know that it had nothing to do with any ordinary complication these people may invent.  Nor was there anything supernatural about it:  what happened to me, I suppose, is as old a story as civilization itself.  I’d been knocking about the world for a good many years, and I’d had time to think.  One day I found myself in the interior of China with a few coolies and a man who I suspect was a ticket-of-leave Englishman.  I