ared.

"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 can see the place now the yellow fog, the sand piled up
against the wall like yellow snow. Desolation was a mild name for it. I
think I began with a consideration of the Englishman who was asleep in
the shadow of a tower. There was something inconceivably hopeless in his
face in that ochre light. Then the place where I was born and brought up
came to me with a startling completeness, and I began to go over my own
life, step by step. To make a long story short, I perceived that what my
father had tr