e 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 su