“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 tried to teach me, in his own way, had some reason in it.  He was a good deal of a man.  I made up my mind I’d come home and start in where I belonged.  But I didn’t do so right away—­I finished the trip first, and lent the Englishman a thousand pounds to buy into a firm in Shanghai.  I suppose,” he added, “that is what is called suggestion.  In my case it was merely the cumulative result of many reflections in waste places.”

“And since then?”