to get away?" asked Chiltern, abruptly.

Honora coloured.

"Oh--did I seem so? Elsie has such a mania for pairing people
off-sometimes it's quite embarrassing."

"She was a little rash in assuming that you'd rather talk to me," he
said, smiling.

"You were not consulted, either."

"I was consulted before lunch," he replied.

"You mean--?"

"I mean that I wanted you," he said. She had known it, of course. The
submarine bell had told her. And he could have found no woman in Newport
who would have brought more enthusiasm to his aid than Elsie Shorter.

"And you usually--get what you want," she retorted with a spark of
rebellion.

"Yes," he admitted. "Only hitherto I haven't wanted very desirable
things."

She laughed, but her curiosity got the better of her.

"Hitherto," she said, "you have just taken what you desired."

From the smouldering fires in his eyes darted an arrowpoint of flame.

"What kind of a man are you?" she asked, throwing the impersonal to the
winds. "Somebody called you a Viking once."

"Who?" he demanded.

"It doesn't matter. I'm beginning to think the name singularly
appropriate. It wouldn't be the first time one landed in Newport,
according to legend," she added.

"I haven't read the poem since childhood," said Chiltern, looking at her
fixedly, "but he became--domesticated, if I remember rightly."

"Yes," she admitted, "the impossible happened to him, as it usually does
in books. And then, circumstances helped. There were no other women."

"When the lady died," said Chiltern, "he fell upon his spear."

"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 disappe