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