“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.”