"I thought you had decided that my mission was to help you slay the dragon?"

"We have to decide on our missions for ourselves," said he.

"Don't you think it sufficient Purpose for a woman who has been in a gray prison all her life—when she finds herself free—to go out and see all that is wonderful in scenery like this, in paintings, architecture, manners, and customs of other nations, in people who have other ideas and feelings from those she knew in prison? You speak as if you're finding fault with me for not doing anything useful. Isn't what I do enough? What else can I do?"

"I don't know," said Sypher, looking at the back of his gloves; then he turned his head and met her eyes in one of his quick glances. "But you, with your color and your build and your voice, seem somehow to me to stand for Force—there's something big about you—just as there's something big about me—Napoleonic—and I can't understand why it doesn't act in some particular direction."

"Oh, you must give me time," cried Zora. "Time to expand, to find out what kind of creature I really am. I tell you I've been in prison. Then I thought I was free and found a purpose, as you call it. Then I had a knock-down blow. I am a widow—I supposed you've guessed. Oh, now, don't speak. It wasn't grief. My married life was a six-weeks' misery. I forget it. I went away from home free five months ago—to see all this"—she waved her hand—"for the first time. Whatever force I have has been devoted to seeing it all, to taking it all in."

She spoke earnestly, just a bit passionately. In the silence that followed she realized with sudden amazement that she had opened her heart to this prime apostle of quackery. As he made no immediate reply, the silence grew tense and she clasped her hands tight, and wondered, as her sex has done from time immemorial, why on earth she had spoken. When he answered it was kindly.

"You've done me a great honor in telling me this. I understand. You want the earth, or as much of it as you can get, and when you've got it and found out what it means, you'll make a great use of it. Have you many friends?"

"No," said Zora. He had an uncanny way of throwing her back on to essentials. "None stronger than myself."

"Will you take me as a friend? I'm strong enough," said Sypher.

"Willingly," she said, dominated by his earnestness.

"That's good. I may be able to help you when you've found your vocation. I can tell you, at any rate, how to get to what you want. You've just got to keep a thing in view and go for it and never let your eyes wander to right or left or up or down. And looking back is fatal—the truest thing in Scripture is about Lot's wife. She looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt."

He paused, his face assumed an air of profound reflection, and he added with gravity:

"And the Clem Sypher of the period when he came by, made use of her, and plastered her over with posters of his cure."

* * * * *

The day she had appointed as the end of her Monte Carlo visit arrived. She would first go to Paris, where some Americans whom she had met in Florence and with whom she had exchanged occasional postcards pressed her to join them. Then London; and then a spell of rest in the lavender of Nunsmere. That was her programme. Septimus Dix was to escort her as far as Paris, in defiance of the proprieties as interpreted by Turner. What was to become of him afterwards neither conjectured; least of all Septimus himself. He said nothing about getting back to Shepherd's Bush. Many brilliant ideas had occurred to him during his absence which needed careful working out. Wherefore Zora concluded that he proposed to accompany her to London.

A couple of hours before the train started she dispatched Turner to Septimus's hotel to remind him of the journey. Turner, a strong-minded woman of forty—like the oyster she had been crossed in love and like her mistress she held men in high contempt—returned with an indignant tale. After a series of parleyings with Mr. Dix through the medium of the hotel chasseur, who had a confused comprehension of voluble English, she had mounted at Mr. Dix's entreaty to his room. There she found him, half clad and in his dressing-gown, staring helplessly at a wilderness of clothing and toilet articles for which there was no space in his suit cases and bag, already piled mountain high.

"I can never do it, Turner," he said as she entered. "What's to be done?"

Turner replied that she did not know; her mistress's instructions were that he should catch the train.

"I'll have to leave behind what I can't get in," he said despondently. "I generally have to do so. I tell the hotel people to give it to widows and orphans. But that's one of the things that make traveling so expensive."

"But you brought everything, sir, in this luggage?"

"I suppose so. Wiggleswick packed. It's his professional training, Turner. I think they call it 'stowing the swag.'"

As Turner had not heard of Wiggleswick's profession, she did not catch the allusion. Nor did Zora enlighten her when she reported the conversation.

"If they went in once they'll go in again," said Turner.

"They won't. They never do," said Septimus.

His plight was so hopeless, he seemed so immeasurably her sex's inferior, that he awoke her contemptuous pity. Besides, her trained woman's hands itched to restore order out of masculine chaos.

"Turn everything out and I'll pack for you," she said resolutely, regardless of the proprieties. On further investigation she held out horrified hands.

He had mixed up shirts with shoes. His clothes were rolled in bundles, his collars embraced his sponge, his trees, divorced from boots, lay on the top of an unprotected bottle of hair-wash; he had tried to fit his brushes against a box of tooth-powder and the top had already come off. Turner shook out his dress suit and discovered a couple of hotel towels which had got mysteriously hidden in the folds. She held them up severely.

"No wonder you can't get your things in if you take away half the hotel linen," and she threw them to the other side of the room.

In twenty minutes she had worked the magic of Wiggleswick. Septimus was humbly grateful.

"If I were you, sir," she said, "I'd go to the station at once and sit on my boxes till my mistress arrives."

"I think I'll do it, Turner," said Septimus.

Turner went back to Zora flushed, triumphant, and indignant.

"If you think, ma'am," said she, "that Mr. Dix is going to help us on our journey, you're very much mistaken. He'll lose his ticket and he'll lose his luggage and he'll lose himself, and we'll have to go and find them."

"You must take Mr. Dix humorously," said Zora.

"I've no desire to take him at all, ma'am." And Turner snorted virtuously, as became her station.

Zora found him humbly awaiting her on the platform in company with Clem Sypher, who presented her with a great bunch of roses and a bundle of illustrated papers. Septimus had received as a parting guerdon an enormous package of the cure, which he embraced somewhat dejectedly. It was Sypher who looked after the luggage of the party. His terrific accent filled the station. Septimus regarded him with envy. He wondered how a man dared order foreign railway officials about like that.

"If I tried to do it they would lock me up. I once interfered in a street row."

Zora did not hear the dire results of the interference. Sypher claimed her attention until the train was on the point of starting.

"Your address in England? You haven't given it."

"The Nook, Nunsmere, Surrey, will always find me."

"Nunsmere?" He paused, pencil in hand, and looked up at her as she stood framed in the railway carriage window. "I nearly bought a house there last year. I was looking out for one with a lawn reaching down to a main railway track. This one had it."

"Penton Court?"

"Yes. That was the name."

"It's still unsold," laughed Zora idly.

"I'll buy it at once," said he.

"En voiture," cried the guard.

Sypher put out his masterful hand.

"Au revoir. Remember. We are friends. I never say what I don't mean."

The train moved out of the station. Zora took her seat opposite Septimus.

"I really believe he'll do it," she said.

"What?"

"Oh, something crazy," said Zora. "Tell me about the street row."

* * * * *

In Paris Zora was caught in the arms of the normal and the uneventful. An American family consisting of a father, mother, son and two daughters touring the continent do not generate an atmosphere of adventure. Their name was Callender, they were wealthy, and the track beaten by the golden feet of their predecessors was good enough for them. They were generous and kindly. There was no subtle complexity in their tastes. They liked the best, they paid for it, and they got it. The women were charming, cultivated and eager for new sensations. They found Zora a new sensation, because she had that range of half tones which is the heritage of a child of an older, grayer civilization. Father and son delighted in her. Most men did. Besides, she relieved the family tedium. The family knew the Paris of the rich Anglo-Saxon and other rich Anglo-Saxons in Paris. Zora accompanied them on their rounds. They lunched and dined in the latest expensive restaurants in the Champs Elysees and the Bois; they went to races; they walked up and down the Rue de la Paix and the Avenue de l'Opera and visited many establishments where the female person is adorned. After the theater they drove to the Cabarets of Montmartre, where they met other Americans and English, and felt comfortably certain that they were seeing the naughty, shocking underside of Paris. They also went to the Louvre and to the Tomb of Napoleon. They stayed at the Grand Hotel.

Zora saw little of Septimus. He knew Paris in a queer, dim way of his own, and lived in an obscure hotel, whose name Zora could not remember, on the other side of the river. She introduced him to the Callenders, and they were quite prepared to receive him into their corporation. But he shrank from so vast a concourse as six human beings; he seemed to be overawed by the multitude of voices, unnerved by the multiplicity of personalities. The unfeathered owl blinked dazedly in general society as the feathered one does in daylight. At first he tried to stand the glare for Zora's sake.

"Come out and mix with people and enjoy yourself," cried Zora, when he was arguing against a proposal to join the party on a Versailles excursion. "I want you to enjoy yourself for once in your life. Besides—you're always so anxious to be human. This will make you human."

"Do you think it will?" he asked seriously. "If you do, I'll come."

But at Versailles they lost him, and the party, as a party, knew him no more. What he did with himself in Paris Zora could not imagine. A Cambridge acquaintance—one of the men on his staircase who had not yet terminated his disastrous career—ran across him in the Boulevard Sevastopol.

"Why—if it isn't the Owl! What are you doing?"

"Oh—hooting," said Septimus.

Which was more information as to his activities than he vouchsafed to give Zora. Once he murmured something about a friend whom he saw occasionally. When she asked him where his friend lived he waved an indeterminate hand eastwards and said, "There!" It was a friend, thought Zora, of whom he had no reason to be proud, for he prevented further questioning by adroitly changing the conversation to the price of hams.

"But what are you going to do with hams?"

"Nothing," said Septimus, "but when I see hams hanging up in a shop I always want to buy them. They look so shiny."

Zora's delicate nostrils sniffed the faintest perfume of a mystery; but a moment afterwards the Callenders carried her off to Ledoyen's and Longchamps and other indubitable actualities in which she forgot things less tangible. Long afterwards she discovered that the friend was an old woman, a marchande des quatre saisons who sold vegetables in the Place de la Republique. He had known her many years, and as she was at the point of death he comforted her with blood-puddings and flowers and hams and the ministrations of an indignant physician. But at the time Septimus hid his Good Samaritanism under a cloud of vagueness.

Then came a period during which Zora lost him altogether. Days passed. She missed him. Life with the Callenders was a continuous shooting of rapids. A quiet talk with Septimus was an hour in a backwater, curiously restful. She began to worry. Had he been run over by an omnibus? Only an ever-recurring miracle could bring him safely across the streets of a great city. When the Callenders took her to the Morgue she dreaded to look at the corpses.

"I do wish I knew what has become of him," she said to Turner.

"Why not write to him, ma'am?" Turner suggested.

"I've forgotten the name of his hotel," said Zora, wrinkling her forehead.

The name of the Hotel Quincamboeuf, where he lodged, eluded her memory.

"I do wish I knew," she repeated.

Then she caught an involuntary but illuminating gleam in Turner's eye, and she bade her look for hairpins. Inwardly she gasped from the shock of revelation; then she laughed to herself, half amused, half indignant. The preposterous absurdity of the suggestion! But in her heart she realized that, in some undefined human fashion, Septimus Dix counted for something in her life. What had become of him?

At last she found him one morning sitting by a table in the courtyard of the Grand Hotel, patiently awaiting her descent. By mere chance she was un-Callendered.

"Why, what—?"

The intended reproval died on her lips as she saw his face. His cheeks were hollow and white, his eyes sunken The man was ill. His hand burned through her glove. Feelings warm and new gushed forth.

"Oh, my dear friend, what is the matter?"

"I must go back to England. I came to say good-bye. I've had this from Wiggleswick."

He handed her an open letter. She waved it away.

"That's of no consequence. Sit down. You're ill. You have a high temperature. You should be in bed."

"I've been," said Septimus. "Four days."

"And you've got up in this state? You must go back at once. Have you seen a doctor? No, of course you haven't. Oh, dear!" She wrung her hands. "You are not fit to be trusted alone. I'll drive you to your hotel and see that you're comfortable and send for a doctor."

"I've left the hotel," said Septimus. "I'm going to catch the eleven train. My luggage is on that cab."

"But it's five minutes past eleven now. You have lost the train—thank goodness."

"I'll be in good time for the four o'clock," said Septimus. "This is the way I generally travel. I told you." He rose, swayed a bit, and put his hand on the table to steady himself. "I'll go and wait at the station. Then I'll be sure to catch it. You see I must go."

"But why?" cried Zora.

"Wiggleswick's letter. The house has been burnt down and everything in it. The only thing he saved was a large portrait of Queen Victoria."

Then he fainted.

* * * * *

Zora had him carried to a room in the hotel and sent for a doctor, who kept him in bed for a fortnight. Zora and Turner nursed him, much to his apologetic content. The Callenders in the meanwhile went to Berlin.

When Septimus got up, gaunt and staring, he appealed to the beholder as the most helpless thing which the Creator had clothed in the semblance of a man.

"He must take very great care of himself for the next few weeks," said the doctor. "If he gets a relapse I won't answer for the consequences. Can't you take him somewhere?"

"Take him somewhere?" The idea had been worrying her for some days past. If she left him to his own initiative he would probably go and camp with Wiggleswick amid the ruins of his house in Shepherd's Bush, where he would fall ill again and die. She would be responsible.

"We can't leave him here, at any rate," she remarked to Turner.

Turner agreed. As well abandon a month-old baby on a doorstep and expect it to earn its livelihood. She also had come to take a proprietary interest in Septimus.

"He might stay with us in Nunsmere. What do you think, Turner?"

"I think, ma'am," said Turner, "that would be the least improper arrangement."

"He can have Cousin Jane's room," mused Zora, knowing that Cousin Jane would fly at her approach.

"And I'll see, ma'am, that he comes down to his meals regular," said Turner.

"Then it's settled," said Zora.

She went forthwith to the invalid and acquainted him with his immediate destiny. At first he resisted. He would be a nuisance. Since his boyhood he had never lived in a lady's house. Even landladies in lodgings had found him impossible. He could not think of accepting more favors from her all too gracious hands.

"You've got to do what you're told," said Zora, conclusively. She noticed a shade of anxiety cross his face. "Is there anything else?"

"Wiggleswick. I don't know what's to become of him."

"He can come to Nunsmere and lodge with the local policeman," said Zora.

On the evening before they started from Paris she received a letter addressed in a curiously feminine hand. It ran:

"DEAR MRS. MIDDLEMIST:

"I don't let the grass grow under my feet. I have bought Penton Court. I have also started a campaign which will wipe the Jebusa Jones people off the face of the earth they blacken. I hope you are finding a vocation. When I am settled at Nunsmere we must talk further of this. I take a greater interest in you than in any other woman I have ever known, and that I believe you take an interest in me is the proud privilege of

"Yours very faithfully, "CLEM SYPHER."

"Here are the three railway tickets, ma'am," said Turner, who had brought up the letter. "I think we had better take charge of them."

Zora laughed, and when Turner had left the room she laughed again. Clem Sypher's letter and Septimus's ticket lay side by side on her dressing-table, and they appealed to her sense of humor. They represented the net result of her misanthropic travels.

What would her mother say? What would Emmy say? What would be the superior remark of the Literary Man from London?

She, Zora Middlemist, who had announced in the market place, with such a flourish of trumpets, that she was starting on her glorious pilgrimage to the Heart of Life, abjuring all conversation with the execrated male sex, to have this ironical adventure! It was deliciously funny. Not only had she found two men in the Heart of Life, but she was bringing them back with her to Nunsmere. She could not hide them from the world in the secrecy of her own memory: there they were in actual, bodily presence, the sole trophies of her quest.

Yet she put a postscript to a letter to her mother.

"I know, in your dear romantic way, you will declare that these two men have fallen in love with me. You'll be wrong. If they had, I shouldn't have anything to do with them. It would have made them quite impossible."

The energy with which she licked and closed the envelope was remarkable but unnecessary.



CHAPTER VI

Things happen slowly at Nunsmere—from the grasping of an idea to the pace of the church choir over the hymns. Life there is no vulgar, tearing two-step, as it is in Godalming, London, and other vortices of human passions, but the stately measure of a minuet. Delights are deliberate and have lingering ends. A hen would scorn to hatch a chicken with the indecent haste of her sister in the next parish.

Six months passed, and Zora wondered what had become of them. Only a few visits to London, where she had consorted somewhat gaily with Emmy's acquaintances, had marked their flight, and the gentle fingers of Nunsmere had graduated the reawakening of her nostalgia for the great world. She spoke now and then of visiting Japan and America and South Africa, somewhat to her mother's consternation; but no irresistible force drove her thither. She found contentment in procrastination.

It had also been a mild amusement to settle Septimus Dix, after his recovery, in a little house facing the common. He had to inhabit some portion of this planet, and as he had no choice of spot save Hackney Downs, which Wiggleswick suggested, Zora waved her hand to the tenantless house and told him to take it. As there was an outhouse at the end of the garden which he could use as a workshop, his principal desideratum in a residence, he obeyed her readily. She then bought his furniture, plate, and linen, and a complicated kitchen battery over whose uses Wiggleswick scratched a bewildered head.

"A saucepan I know, and a frying-pan I know, but what you're to put in those things with holes in them fairly licks me."

"Perhaps we might grow geraniums in them," said Septimus brightly, alter a fit of musing.

"If you do," said Zora, "I'll put a female cook in charge of you both, and wash my hands of you."

Whereupon she explained the uses of a cullender, and gave Wiggleswick to understand that she was a woman of her word, and that an undrained cabbage would be the signal for the execution of her threat. From the first she had assumed despotic power over Wiggleswick, of whose influence with his master she had been absurdly jealous. But Wiggleswick, bent, hoary, deaf, crabbed, evil old ruffian that he was, like most ex-prisoners instinctively obeyed the word of command, and meekly accepted Zora as his taskmistress.

For Septimus began happy days wherein the clock was disregarded. The vague projects that had filled his head for the construction of a new type of quick-firing gun took definite shape. Some queer corner of his brain had assimilated a marvelous knowledge of field artillery, and Zora was amazed at the extent of his technical library, which Wiggleswick had overlooked in his statement of the salvage from the burned-down house at Shepherd's Bush. Now and then he would creep from the shyness which enveloped the inventive side of his nature, and would talk with her with unintelligible earnestness of these dreadful engines; of radial and initial hoop pressures, of drift angles, of ballistics, of longitudinal tensions, and would jot down trigonometrical formulae illustrated by diagrams until her brain reeled; or of his treatise on guns of large caliber just written and now in the printers' hands, and of the revolution in warfare these astounding machines would effect. His eyes would lose their dreamy haze and would become luminous, his nervous fingers would become effectual, the man would become transfigured; but as soon as the fervid fit passed off he would turn with amiable aimlessness to his usual irrelevance. Sometimes he would work all night, either in his room or his workshop, at his inventions. Sometimes he would dream for days together. There was an old-fashioned pond in the middle of the common, with rough benches placed here and there at the brink. Septimus loved to sit on one of them and look at the ducks. He said he was fascinated by the way they wagged their tails. It suggested an invention: of what nature he could not yet determine. He also formed a brotherly intimacy with a lame donkey belonging to the sexton, and used to feed him with pate de foie gras sandwiches, specially prepared by Wiggleswick, until he was authoritatively informed that raw carrots would be more acceptable. To see the two of them side by side watching the ducks in the pond wag their tails was a touching spectacle.

Another amenity in Septimus's peaceful existence was Emmy.

Being at this time out of an engagement, she paid various flying visits to Nunsmere, bringing with her an echo of comic opera and an odor of Peau d'Espagne. She dawned on Septimus's horizon like a mischievous and impertinent planet, so different from Zora, the great fixed star of his heaven, yet so pretty, so twinkling, so artlessly and so obviously revolving round some twopenny-halfpenny sun of her own, that he took her, with Wiggleswick, the ducks and the donkey, into his close comradeship. It was she who had ordained the carrots. She had hair like golden thistledown, and the dainty, blonde skin that betrays every motion of the blood. She could blush like the pink tea-rose of an old-fashioned English garden. She could blanch to the whiteness of alabaster. Her eyes were forget-me-nots after rain. Her mouth was made for pretty slang and kisses. Neither her features nor her most often photographed expression showed the tiniest scrap of what the austere of her sex used to call character. When the world smiled on her she laughed: when it frowned, she cried. When she met Septimus Dix, she flew to him as a child does to a new toy, and spent gorgeous hours in pulling him to pieces to see how he worked.

"Why aren't you married?" she asked him one day.

He looked up at the sky—they were on the common—an autumn stretch of pearls and purples, with here and there a streak of wistful blue, as if seeking the inspiration of a reason.

"Because no one has married me," he replied.

Emmy laughed. "That's just like you. You expect a woman to drag you out of your house by the scruff of your neck and haul you to church without your so much as asking her."

"I've heard that lots of women do," said Septimus.

Emmy looked at him sharply. Every woman resents a universal criticism of her sex, but cannot help feeling a twinge of respect for the critic. She took refuge in scorn.

"A real man goes out and looks for a wife."

"But suppose he doesn't want one?"

"He must want a woman to love. What can his life be without a woman in it? What can anybody's life be without some one to care for? I really believe you're made of sawdust. Why don't you fall in love?"

Septimus took off his hat, ran his fingers through his upstanding hair, re-covered his head, and looked at her helplessly.

"Oh, no! I'm booked. It's no use your falling in love with me."

"I wouldn't—presume to do such a thing," he stammered, somewhat scared. "I think love is serious. It's like an invention: sometimes it lies deep down inside you, great and quiet—and at other times it racks you and keeps you from sleeping."

"Oho!" cried Emmy. "So you know all about it. You are in love. Now, tell me, who is she?"

"It was many years ago," said Septimus. "She wore pigtails and I burned a hole in her pinafore with a toy cannon and she slapped my face. Afterwards she married a butcher."

He looked at her with his wan smile, and again raised his hat and ran his hand through his hair. Emmy was not convinced.

"I believe," she said, "you have fallen in love with Zora."

He did not reply for a moment or two; then he touched her arm.

"Please don't say that," he said, in an altered tone.

Emmy edged up close to him, as they walked. It was her nature, even while she teased, to be kind and caressing.

"Not even if it's true? Why not?"

"Things like that are not spoken of," he said soberly. "They're only felt."

This time it was she who put a hand on his arm, with a charming, sisterly air.

"I hope you won't make yourself miserable over it. You see, Zora is impossible. She'll never marry again. I do hope it's not serious. Is it?" As he did not answer, she continued: "It would be such—such rot wasting your life over a thing you haven't a chance of getting."

"Why?" said Septimus. "Isn't that the history of the best lives?"

This philosophic plane was too high for Emmy, who had her pleasant being in a less rarified atmosphere. "To want, to get, to enjoy," was the guiding motto of her existence. What was the use of wanting unless you got, and what was the use of getting unless you enjoyed? She came to the conclusion that Septimus was only sentimentally in love with Zora, and she regarded his tepid passion as a matter of no importance. At the same time her easy discovery delighted her. It invested Septimus with a fresh air of comicality.

"You're just the sort of man to write poetry about her. Don't you?"

"Oh, no!" said Septimus.

"Then what do you do?"

"I play the bassoon," said he.

Emmy clapped her hands with joy, thereby scaring a hen that was straying on the common.

"Another accomplishment? Why didn't you tell us? I'm sure Zora doesn't know of it. Where did you learn?"

"Wiggleswick taught me," said he. "He was once in a band."

"You must bring it round," cried Emmy.

But when Septimus, prevailed on by her entreaties, did appear with the instrument in Mrs. Oldrieve's drawing-room, he made such unearthly and terrific noises that Mrs. Oldrieve grew pale and Zora politely but firmly took it from his hands and deposited it in the umbrella-stand in the hall.

"I hope you don't mind," she said.

"Oh, dear, no," said Septimus mildly. "I could never make out why anybody liked it."

Seeing that Septimus had a sentimental side to his character, Emmy gradually took him into her confidence, until Septimus knew things that Zora did not dream of. Zora, who had been married, and had seen the world from Nunsmere Pond to the crater of Mount Vesuvius, treated her sister with matronly indulgence, as a child to whom Great Things were unrevealed. She did not reckon with the rough-and-tumble experiences of life which a girl must gain from a two years' battle on the stage. In fact, she did not reckon with any of the circumstances of Emmy's position. She herself was too ignorant, too much centered as yet in her own young impulses and aspirations, and far too serene in her unquestioning faith in the impeccability of the Oldrieve family. To her Emmy was still the fluffy-haired little sister with caressing ways whom she could send upstairs for her work-basket or could reprimand for a flirtation. Emmy knew that Zora loved her dearly; but she was the least bit in the world afraid of her, and felt that in affairs of the heart she would be unsympathetic. So Emmy withheld her confidence from Zora, and gave it to Septimus. Besides, it always pleases a woman more to tell her secrets to a man than to another woman. There is more excitement in it, even though the man be as unmoved as a stock-fish.

Thus it fell out that Septimus heard of Mordaunt Prince, whose constant appearance in Emmy's London circle of friends Zora had viewed with plentiful lack of interest. He was a paragon of men. He acted like a Salvini and sang like an angel. He had been far too clever to take his degree at Oxford. He had just bought a thousand-guinea motor car, and—Septimus was not to whisper a word of it to Zora—she had recently been on a three-days' excursion with him. Mordaunt Prince said this and Mordaunt Prince said that. Mordaunt paid three guineas a pair for his brown boots. He had lately divorced his wife, an unspeakable creature only too anxious for freedom. Mordaunt came to see her every day in London, and every day during their absence they corresponded. Her existence was wrapped up in Mordaunt Prince. She traveled about with a suit-case (or so it appeared to Septimus) full of his photographs. He had been the leading man at the theater where she had her last engagement, and had fallen madly, devotedly, passionately in love with her. As soon as the divorce was made absolute they would be married. She had quarreled with her best friend, who had tried to make mischief between them with a view to securing Mordaunt for herself. Had Septimus ever heard of such a cat? Septimus hadn't.

He was greatly interested in as much of the story as he could follow—Emmy was somewhat discursive—and as his interjectory remarks were unprovocative of argument, he constituted himself a good listener. Besides, romance had never come his way. It was new to him, even Emmy's commonplace little romance, like a field of roses to a town-bred child, and it seemed sweet and gracious, a thing to dream about. His own distant worship of Zora did not strike him as romantic. It was a part of himself, like the hallowed memory of his mother and the conception of his devastating guns. Had he been more worldly-wise he would have seen possible danger in Emmy's romance, and insisted on Zora being taken into their confidence. But Septimus believed that the radiant beings of the earth, such as Emmy and Mordaunt Prince, from whom a quaint destiny kept him aloof, could only lead radiant lives, and the thought of harm did not cross his candid mind. Even while keeping Emmy's secret from Zora, he regarded it as a romantic and even dainty deceit.

Zora, seeing him happy with his guns and Wiggleswick and Emmy, applauded herself mightily as a contriver of good. Her mother also put ideas into her head.

From the drawing-room window they once saw Emmy and Septimus part at the little front gate. They had evidently returned from a walk. She plucked a great white chrysanthemum bloom from a bunch she was carrying, flicked it laughingly in his face, and stuck it in his buttonhole.

"What a good thing it would be for Emmy," said Mrs. Oldrieve, with a sigh.

"To marry Septimus? Oh, mother!"

She laughed merrily; then all at once she became serious.

"Why not?" she cried, and kissed her mother.

Mrs. Oldrieve settled her cap. She was small and Zora was large, and Zora's embraces were often disarranging.

"He is a gentleman and can afford to keep a wife."

"And steady?" said Zora, with a smile.

"I should think quite steady," said Mrs. Oldrieve, without one.

"And he would amuse Emmy all day long."

"I don't think it is part of a husband's duty, dear, to amuse his wife," said Mrs. Oldrieve.

The sudden entrance of Emmy, full of fresh air, laughter, and chrysanthemums, put an end to the conversation; but thenceforward Zora thought seriously of romantic possibilities. Like her mother, she did not entirely approve of Emmy's London circle. It was characterized by too much freedom, too great a lack of reticence. People said whatever came into their minds, and did, apparently, whatever occurred to their bodies. She could not quite escape from her mother's Puritan strain. For herself she felt secure. She, Zora, could wander unattended over Europe, mixing without spot or stain with whatever company she listed; that was because she was Zora Middlemist, a young woman of exceptional personality and experience of life. Ordinary young persons, for their own safe conduct, ought to obey the conventions which were made with that end in view; and Emmy was an ordinary young person. She should marry; it would conduce to her moral welfare, and it would be an excellent thing for Septimus. The marriage was therefore made in the unclouded heaven of Zora's mind. She shed all her graciousness over the young couple. Never had Emmy felt herself enwrapped in more sisterly affection. Never had Septimus dreamed of such tender solicitude. Yet she sang Septimus's praises to Emmy and Emmy's praises to Septimus in so natural a manner that neither of the two was puzzled.

"It is the natural instinct that makes every woman a matchmaker. She works blindly towards the baby. If she cannot have one directly, she will have it vicariously. The sourest of old maids is thus doomed to have a hand in the perpetuation of the race."

Thus spake the Literary Man from London, discoursing generally—out of earshot of the Vicar and his wife, to whom he was paying one of his periodical visits—in a corner of their drawing-room. Zora, conscious of matchmaking, declared him to be horrid and physiological.

"A woman is much more refined and delicate in her motives."

"The highly civilized woman," said Rattenden, "is delightfully refined in her table manners, and eats cucumber sandwiches in the most delicate way in the world; but she is obeying the same instinct that makes your lady cannibal thrust raw gobbets of missionary into her mouth with her fingers."

"Your conversation is revolting," said Zora.

"Because I speak the truth? Truth is a Mokanna."

"What on earth is that?" asked Zora.

The Literary man sighed. "The Veiled Prophet of Khorasan, Lalla Rookh, Tom Moore. Ichabod."

"It sounds like a cypher cablegram," said Zora flippantly. "But go on."

"I will. Truth, I say, is a Mokanna. So long as it's decently covered with a silver veil, you all prostrate yourselves before it and pretend to worship it. When anyone lifts the veil and reveals the revolting horror of it, you run away screaming, with your hands before your eyes. Why do you want truth to be pretty? Why can't you look its ghastliness bravely in the face? How can you expect to learn anything if you don't? How can you expect to form judgments on men and things? How can you expect to get to the meaning of life on which you were so keen a year ago?"

"I want beauty, and not disgustfulness," said Zora.

"Should it happen, for the sake of argument, that I wanted two dear friends to marry, it is only because I know how happy they would be together. The ulterior motive you suggest is repulsive."

"But it's true," said Rattenden. "I wish I could talk to you more. I could teach you a great deal. At any rate I know that you'll think about what I've said to-day."

"I won't," she declared.

"You will," said he. And then he dropped a very buttery piece of buttered toast on the carpet and, picking it up, said "damn" under his breath; and then they both laughed, and Zora found him human.

"Why are you so bent on educating me?" she asked.

"Because," said he, "I am one of the few men of your acquaintance who doesn't want to marry you."

"Indeed?" said Zora sarcastically, yet hating herself for feeling a little pang of displeasure. "May I ask why?"

"Because," said he, "I've a wife and five children already."

* * * * *

On the top of her matchmaking and her reflections on Truth in the guise of the Veiled Prophet of Khorasan, came Clem Sypher to take possession of his new house. Since Zora had seen him in Monte Carlo he had been to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, fighting the Jebusa Jones dragon in its lair. He had written Zora stout dispatches during the campaign. Here a victory. There a defeat. Everywhere a Napoleonic will to conquer—but everywhere also an implied admission of the almost invulnerable strength of his enemy.

"I'm physically tired," said he, on the first day of his arrival, spreading his large frame luxuriously among the cushions of Mrs. Oldrieve's chintz-covered Chesterfield. "I'm tired for the only time in my life. I wanted you," he added, with one of his quick, piercing looks. "It's a curious thing, but I've kept saying to myself for the last month, 'If I could only come into Zora Middlemist's presence and drink in some of her vitality, I should be a new man.' I've never wanted a human being before. It's strange, isn't it?"

Zora came up to him, tea in hand, a pleasant smile on her face.

"The Nunsmere air will rest you," she said demurely.

"I don't think much of the air if you're not in it. It's like whiskey-less soda water." He drew a long breath. "My God! It's good to see you again. You're the one creature on this earth who believes in the Cure as I do myself."

Zora glanced at him guiltily. Her enthusiasm for the Cure as a religion was tepid. In her heart she did not believe in it. She had tried it a few weeks before on the sore head of a village baby, with disastrous results; then the mother had called in the doctor, who wrote out a simple prescription which healed the child immediately. The only real evidence of its powers she had seen was on Septimus's brown boots. Humanity, however, forbade her to deny the faith with which Clem Sypher credited her; also a genuine feeling of admiration mingled with pity for the man.

"Do you find much scepticism about?" she asked.

"It's lack of enthusiasm I complain of," he replied. "Instead of accepting it as the one heaven-sent remedy, people will use any other puffed and advertised stuff. Chemists are even lukewarm. A grain of mustard seed of faith among them would save me thousands of pounds a year. Not that I want to roll in money, Mrs. Middlemist. I'm not an avaricious man. But a great business requires capital—and to spend money merely in flogging the invertebrate is waste—desperate waste."

It was the first time that Zora had heard the note of depression.

"Now that you are here, you must stay for a breathing space," she said kindly. "You must forget it, put it out of your mind, take a holiday. Strong as you are, you are not cast iron, and if you broke down, think what a disaster it would be for the Cure."

"Will you help me to have a holiday?"

She laughed. "To the best of my ability—and provided you don't want to make me shock Nunsmere too much."

He waved his hand in the direction of the village and said, Napoleonically:

"I'll look after Nunsmere. I have the motor here. We can go all over the country. Will you come?"

"On one condition."

"And that?"

"That you won't spread the Cure among our Surrey villages, and that you'll talk of something else all the time."

He rose and put out his hand. "I accept," he cried frankly. "I'm not a fool. I know you're right. When are you coming to see Penton Court? I will give a housewarming You say that Dix has settled down here. I'll look him up. I'll be glad to see the muddle-headed seraph again. I'll ask him to come, too, so there will be you and he—and perhaps your sister will honor me, and your mother, Mrs. Oldrieve?"

"Mother doesn't go out much nowadays," said Zora. "But Emmy will no doubt be delighted to come."

"I have a surprise for you," said Sypher. "It's a brilliant idea—have had it in my head for months—you must tell me what you think of it."

The entrance of Mrs. Oldrieve and Emmy put an end to further talk of an intimate nature, and as Mrs. Oldrieve preferred the simple graces of stereotyped conversation, the remainder of Sypher's visit was uneventful. When he had taken his leave she remarked that he seemed to be a most superior person.

"I'm so glad he has made a good impression on mother," said Zora afterwards.

"Why?" asked Emmy.

"It's only natural that I should be glad."

"Oho!" said Emmy.

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing, dear."

"Look here, Emmy," said Zora, half laughing, half angry. "If you say or think such a thing I'll—I'll slap you. Mr. Sypher and I are friends. He hasn't the remotest idea of our being anything else. If he had, I would never speak to him again as long as I live."

Emmy whistled a comedy air, and drummed on the window-pane.

"He's a very remarkable man," said Zora.

"A most superior person," mimicked Emmy.

"And I don't think it's very good taste in us to discuss him in this manner."

"But, my dear," said Emmy, "it's you that are discussing him. I'm not. The only remark I made about him was a quotation from mother."

"I'm going up to dress for dinner," said Zora.

She was just a little indignant. Only into Emmy's fluffy head could so preposterous an idea have entered. Clem Sypher in love with her? If so, why not Septimus Dix? The thing thus reduced itself to an absurdity. She laughed to herself, half ashamed of having allowed Emmy to see that she took her child's foolishness seriously, and came down to dinner serene and indulgent.



CHAPTER VII

"Are you going to have your bath first, or your breakfast?" asked Wiggleswick, putting his untidy gray head inside the sitting-room door.

Septimus ran his ivory rule nervously through his hair.

"I don't know. Which would you advise?"

"What?" bawled Wiggleswick.

Septimus repeated his remark in a louder voice.

"If I had to wash myself in cold water," said Wiggleswick contemptuously, "I'd do it on an empty stomach."

"But if the water were warm?"

"Well, the water ain't warm, so it's no good speculating."

"Dear me," said Septimus. "Now that's just what I enjoy doing."

Wiggleswick grunted. "I'll turn on the tap and leave it."

The door having closed behind his body servant, Septimus laid his ivory rule on the portion of the complicated diagram of machinery which he had been measuring off, and soon became absorbed in his task. It was four o'clock in the afternoon. He had but lately risen, and sat in pyjamas and dressing-gown over his drawing. A bundle of proofs and a jam-pot containing a dissipated looking rosebud lay on that space of the table not occupied by the double-elephant sheet of paper. By his side was a manuscript covered with calculations to which he referred or added from time to time. A bleak November light came in through the window, and Septimus's chair was on the right-hand side of the table. It was characteristic of him to sit unnecessarily in his own light.

Presently a more than normal darkening of the room caused him to look at the window. Clem Sypher stood outside, gazing at him with amused curiosity. Hospitably, Septimus rose and flung the casement window open.

"Do come in."

As the aperture was two feet square, all of Clem Sypher that could respond to the invitation was his head and shoulders.

"Is it good morning, good afternoon, or good night?" he asked, surveying Septimus's attire.

"Morning," said Septimus. "I've just got up. Have some breakfast."

He moved to a bell-pull by the fireplace, and the tug was immediately followed by a loud report.

"What the devil's that?" asked Sypher, startled.

"That," said Septimus mildly, "is an invention. I pull the rope and a pistol is fired off in the kitchen. Wiggleswick says he can't hear bells. What's for breakfast?" he asked, as Wiggleswick entered.

"Haddock. And the bath's running over."

Septimus waved him away. "Let it run." He turned to Sypher. "Have a haddock?"

"At four o'clock in the afternoon? Do you want me to be sick?"

"Good heavens, no!" cried Septimus. "Do come in and I'll give you anything you like."

He put his hand again on the bell-pull. A hasty exclamation from Sypher checked his impulse.

"I say, don't do that again. If you'll open the front door for me," he added, "I may be able to get inside."

A moment or two later Sypher was admitted, by the orthodox avenues, into the room. He looked around him, his hands on his hips.

"I wonder what on earth this would have been like if our dear lady hadn't had a hand in it."

As Septimus's imagination was entirely scientific he could furnish no solution to the problem. He drew a chair to the fire and bade his guest sit down, and handed him a box of cigars which also housed a pair of compasses, some stamps, and a collar stud. Sypher selected and lit a cigar, but declined the chair for the moment.

"You don't mind my looking you up? I told you yesterday I would do it, but you're such a curious creature there's no knowing at what hour you can receive visitors. Mrs. Middlemist told me you were generally in to lunch at half-past four in the morning. Hello, an invention?"

"Yes," said Septimus.

Sypher pored over the diagram. "What on earth is it all about?"

"It's to prevent people getting killed in railway collisions," replied Septimus. "You see, the idea is that every compartment should consist of an outer shell and an inner case in which passengers sit. The roof is like a lid. When there's a collision this series of levers is set in motion, and at once the inner case is lifted through the roof and the people are out of the direct concussion. I haven't quite worked it out yet," he added, passing his hand through his hair. "You see, the same thing might happen when they're just coupling some more carriages on to a train at rest, which would be irritating to the passengers."

"Very," said Sypher, drily. "It would also come rather expensive, wouldn't it?"

"How could expense be an object when there are human lives to be saved?"

"I think, my friend Dix," said Sypher, "you took the wrong turning in the Milky Way before you were born. You were destined for a more enlightened planet. If they won't pay thirteen pence halfpenny for Sypher's Cure, how can you expect them to pay millions for your inventions? That Cure—but I'm not going to talk about it. Mrs. Middlemist's orders. I'm here for a rest. What are these? Proofs? Writing a novel?"

He held up the bundle with one of his kindly smiles and one of his swift glances at Septimus.

"It's my book on guns."

"Can I look?"

"Certainly."

Sypher straightened out the bundle—it was in page-proof—and read the title:

"A Theoretical Treatise on the Construction of Guns of Large Caliber. By Septimus Dix, M.A." He looked through the pages. "This seems like sense, but there are text-books, aren't there, giving all this information?"

"No," said Septimus modestly. "It begins where the text-books leave off. The guns I describe have never been cast."

"Where on earth do you get your knowledge of artillery?"

Septimus dreamed through the mists of memory.

"A nurse I once had married a bombardier," said he.

Wiggleswick entered with the haddock and other breakfast appurtenances, and while Septimus ate his morning meal Sypher smoked and talked and looked through the pages of the Treatise. The lamps lit and the curtains drawn, the room had a cosier appearance than by day. Sypher stretched himself comfortably before the fire.

"I'm not in the way, am I?"

"Good heavens, no!" said Septimus. "I was just thinking how pleasant it was. I've not had a man inside my rooms since I was up at Cambridge—and then they didn't come often, except to rag."

"What did they do?"

Septimus narrated the burnt umbrella episode and other social experiences.

"So that when a man comes to see me who does not throw my things about, he is doubly welcome," he explained. "Besides," he added, after a drink of coffee, "we said something in Monte Carlo about being friends."

"We did," said Sypher, "and I'm glad you've not forgotten it. I'm so much the Friend of Humanity in the bulk that I've somehow been careless as to the individual."

"Have a drink," said Septimus, filling his after-breakfast pipe.

The pistol shot brought Wiggleswick, who, in his turn, brought whiskey and soda, and the two friends finished the afternoon in great amity. Before taking his departure Sypher asked whether he might read through the proofs of the gun book at home.

"I think I know enough of machinery and mathematics to understand what you're driving at, and I should like to examine these guns of yours. You think they are going to whip creation?"

"They'll make warfare too dangerous to be carried on. At present, however, I'm more interested in my railway carriages."

"Which will make railway traveling too dangerous to be carried on!" laughed Sypher, extending his hand. "Good-by."

When he had gone, Septimus mused for some time in happy contentment over his pipe. He asked very little of the world, and oddly enough the world rewarded his modesty by giving him more than he asked for. To-day he had seen Sypher in a new mood, sympathetic, unegotistical, non-robustious, and he felt gratified at having won a man's friendship. It was an addition to his few anchorages in life. Then, in a couple of hours he would sun himself in the smiles of his adored mistress, and listen to the prattle of his other friend, Emmy. Mrs. Oldrieve would be knitting by the lamp, and probably he would hold her wool, drop it, and be scolded as if he were a member of the family; all of which was a very gracious thing to the sensitive, lonely man, warming his heart and expanding his nature. It filled his head with dreams: of a woman dwelling by right in this house of his, and making the air fragrant by her presence. But as the woman—although he tried his utmost to prevent it and to conjure up the form of a totally different type—took the shape of Zora Middlemist, he discouraged such dreams as making more for mild unhappiness than for joy, and bent his thoughts to his guns and railway carriages and other world-upheaving inventions. The only thing that caused him any uneasiness was an overdraft at his bank due to cover which he had to pay on shares purchased for him by a circularizing bucket-shop keeper. It had seemed so simple to write Messrs. Shark & Co., or whatever alias the philanthropic financier assumed, a check for a couple of hundred pounds, and receive Messrs. Shark's check for two thousand in a fortnight, that he had wondered why other people did not follow this easy road to fortune. Perhaps they did, he reflected: that was how they managed to keep a large family of daughters and a motor car. But when the shark conveyed to him in unintelligible terms the fact that unless he wrote a check for two or three hundred pounds more his original stake would be lost, and when these also fell through the bottomless bucket of Messrs. Shark & Co. and his bankers called his attention to an overdrawn account, it began to dawn upon him that these were not the methods whereby a large family of daughters and a motor car were unprecariously maintained. The loss did not distress him to the point of sleeplessness; his ideas as to the value of money were as vague as his notions on the rearing of babies; but he was publishing his book at his own expense, and was concerned at not being in a position to pay the poor publisher immediately.

At Mrs. Oldrieve's he found his previsions nearly all fulfilled. Zora, with a sofa-ful of railway time-tables and ocean-steamer handbooks, sought his counsel as to a voyage round the world which she had in contemplation; Mrs. Oldrieve impressed on his memory a recipe for an omelette which he was to convey verbally to Wiggleswick, although he confessed that the only omelette that Wiggleswick had tried to make they had used for months afterwards as a kettle-holder; but Emmy did not prattle. She sat in a corner, listlessly turning over the leaves of a novel and taking an extraordinary lack of interest in the general conversation. The usual headache and neuralgia supplied her excuse. She looked pale, ill, and worried; and worry on a baby face is a lugubrious and pitiful spectacle.

After Mrs. Oldrieve had retired for the night, and while Zora happened to be absent from the room in search of an atlas, Septimus and Emmy were left alone for a moment.

"I'm so sorry you have a headache," said Septimus sympathetically. "Why don't you go to bed?"

"I hate bed. I can't sleep," she replied, with an impatient shake of the body. "You mustn't mind me. I'm sorry I'm so rotten—ah! well then—such an uninspiring companion, if you like," she added, seeing that the word had jarred on him. Then she rose. "I suppose I bore you. I had better go, as you suggest, and get out of the way."

He intercepted her petulant march to the door.

"I wish you'd tell me what's the matter. It isn't only a headache."

"It's Hell and the Devil and all his angels," said Emmy, "and I'd like to murder somebody."

"You can murder me, if it would do you any good," said Septimus.

"I believe you'd let me," she said, yielding. "You're a good sort." She turned, with a short laugh, her novel held in both hands behind her back, one finger holding the place. A letter dropped from it. Septimus picked it up and handed it to her. It bore an Italian stamp and the Naples postmark.

"Yes. That's from him," she said resentfully. "I've not had a letter for a week, and now he writes to say he has gone to Naples on account of his health. You had better let me go, my good Septimus; if I stay here much longer I'll be talking slush and batter. I've got things on my nerves."

"Why don't you talk to Zora?" he suggested. "She is so wonderful."

"She's the last person in the world that must know anything. Do you understand? The very last."

"I'm afraid I don't understand," he replied ruefully.

"She doesn't know anything about Mordaunt Prince. She must never know. Neither must mother. They don't often talk much about the family; but they're awfully proud of it. Mother's people date from before Noah, and they look down on the Oldrieves because they sprang up like mushrooms just after the Flood. Prince's real name is Huzzle, and his father kept a boot shop. I don't care a hang, because he's a gentleman, but they would."

"But yet you're going to marry him. They must know sooner or later. They ought to know."

"Time enough when I'm married. Then nothing can be done and nothing can be said."

"Have you ever thought whether it wouldn't be well to give him up?" said Septimus, in his hesitating way.

"I can't, I can't!" she cried. Then she burst into tears, and, afraid lest Zora should surprise her, left the room without another word.

On such occasions the most experienced man is helpless. He shrugs his shoulders, says "Whew!" and lights a cigarette. Septimus, with an infant's knowledge of the ways of young women, felt terribly distressed by the tragedy of her tears. Something must be done to stop them. He might start at once for Naples, and, by the help of strong gendarmes whom he might suborn, bring back Mordaunt Prince presently to London. Then he remembered his overdrawn banking account, and sighfully gave up the idea. If only he were not bound to secrecy and could confide in Zora. This a sensitive honor forbade. What could he do? As the fire was getting low he mechanically put on a lump of coal with the pincers. When Zora returned with the atlas she found him rubbing them through his hair, and staring at vacancy.

"If I do go round the world," said Zora, a little while later, when they had settled on which side of South America Valparaiso was situated—and how many nice and clever people could tell you positively, offhand?—"if I go round the world, you and Emmy will have to come too. It would do her good. She has not been looking well lately."

"It would be the very thing for her," said he.

"And for you too, Septimus," she remarked, with a quizzical glance and smile.

"It's always good for me to be where you are."

"I was thinking of Emmy and not of myself," she laughed. "If you could take care of her, it would be an excellent thing for you."

"She wouldn't even trust me with her luggage," said Septimus, miles away from Zora's meaning. "Would you?"

She laughed again. "I'm different. I should really have to look after the two of you. But you could pretend to be taking care of Emmy."

"I would do anything that gave you pleasure."

"Would you?" she asked.

They were sitting by the table—the atlas between them. She moved her hand and touched his. The light of the lamp shone through her hair, turning it to luminous gold. Her arm was bare to the elbow, and the warm fragrance of her nearness overspread him. The touch thrilled him to the depths, and he flushed to his upstanding Struwel Peter hair. He tried to say something—he knew not what; but his throat was smitten with sudden dryness. It seemed to him that he had sat there, for the best part of an hour, tongue-tied, looking stupidly at the confluence of the blue veins on her arm, longing to tell her that his senses swam with the temptation of her touch and the rise and fall of her bosom, through the great love he had for her, and yet terror-stricken lest she might discover his secret, and punish his audacity according to the summary methods of Juno, Diana, and other offended goddesses whom mortals dared to love. It could only have been a few seconds, for he heard her voice in his ears, at first faint and then gathering distinctness, continuing in almost the same breath as her question.

"Would you? Do you know the greatest pleasure you could give me? It would be to become my brother—my real brother."

He turned bewildered eyes upon her.

"Your brother?"

She laughed, half impatiently, half gaily, gave his hand a final tap and rose. He stood, too, mechanically.

"I think you're the obtusest man I've ever met. Anyone else would have guessed long ago. Don't you see, you dear, foolish thing"—she laid her hands on his shoulders and looked with agonizing deliciousness into his face—"don't you see that you want a wife to save you from omelettes that you have to use as kettle-holders, and to give you a sense of responsibility? And don't you see that Emmy, who is never happier than when—oh!" she broke off impatiently, "don't you see?"

He had built for himself no card house of illusion, so it did not come toppling down with dismaying clatter. But all the same he felt as if her kind hands had turned death cold and were wringing his heart. He took them from his shoulders, and, not unpicturesquely, kissed her finger-tips. Then he dropped them and walked to the fire and, with his back to the room, leaned on the mantelpiece. A little china dog fell with a crash into the fender.

"Oh, I'm so sorry—" he began piteously.

"Never mind," said Zora, helping him to pick up the pieces. "A man who can kiss a woman's hands like that is at liberty to clear the whole house of gimcrackery."

"You are a very gracious lady. I said so long ago," replied Septimus.

"I think I'm a fool," said Zora.

His face assumed a look of horror. His goddess a fool? She laughed gaily.

"You look as if you were about to remark, 'If any man had said that, the word would have been his last'! But I am, really. I thought there might be something between you and Emmy and that a little encouragement might help you. Forgive me. You see," she went on, a trace of dewiness in her frank eyes, "I love Emmy dearly, and in a sort of way I love you, too. And need I give any more explanation?"

It was an honorable amends, royally made. Zora had a magnificent style in doing such things: an indiscreet, venturesome, meddlesome princess she might be, if you will; somewhat unreserved, somewhat too conscious of her own Zoraesque sufficiency to possess the true womanly intuition and sympathy; but still a princess who had the grand manner in her scorn of trivialities. Septimus's hand shook a little as he fitted the tail to the hollow bit of china dog-end. It was sweet to be loved, although it was bitter to be loved in a sort of way. Even a man like Septimus Dix has his feelings. He had to hide them.

"You make me very happy," he said. "Your caring so much for me as to wish me to marry your sister, I shall never forget it. You see, I've never thought of her in that way. I suppose I don't think of women at all in that way," he went on, with a certain splendid mendacity. "It's a case of cog-wheels instead of corpuscles. I'm just a heathen bit of machinery, with my head full of diagrams."

"You're a tender-hearted baby," said Zora. "Give me those bits of dog."

She took them from his hand and threw the mutilated body into the fire.

"See," she said, "let us keep tokens. I'll keep the head and you the tail. If ever you want me badly send me the tail, and I'll come to you from any distance—and if I want you I'll send you the head."

"I'll come to you from the ends of the earth," said Septimus.

So he went home a happy man, with his tail in his pocket.

* * * * *

The next morning, about eight o'clock, just as he was sinking into his first sleep, he was awakened through a sudden dream of battle by a series of revolver shots. Wondering whether Wiggleswick had gone mad or was attempting an elaborate and painful mode of suicide, he leaped out of bed and rushed to the landing.

"What's the matter?"

"Hello! You're up at last!" cried Clem Sypher, appearing at the bottom of the stairs, sprucely attired for the city, and wearing a flower in the buttonhole of his overcoat. "I've had to break open the front door in order to get in at all, and then I tried shooting the bell for your valet. Can I come up?"

"Do," said Septimus, shivering. "Do you mind if I go back to bed?"

"Do anything, except go to sleep," said Sypher. "Look here. I'm sorry if I disturbed you, but I couldn't wait. I'm off to the office and heaven knows when I shall be back. I want to talk to you about this."

He sat on the foot of the bed and threw the proofs of the gun book on to Septimus's body, vaguely outlined beneath the clothes. In the gray November light—Zora's carefully chosen curtains and blinds had not been drawn—Sypher, pink and shiny, his silk hat (which he wore) a resplendent miracle of valetry, looked an urban yet roseate personification of Dawn. He seemed as eager as Septimus was supine.

"I've sat up half the night over this thing," said he, "and I really believe you've got it."

"Got what?" asked Septimus.

"It. The biggest thing on earth, bar Sypher's Cure."

"Wait till I've worked out my railway carriages," said Septimus.

"Your railway carriages! Good gracious! Haven't you any sense of what you're doing? Here you've worked out a scheme that may revolutionize naval gunnery, and you talk rot about railway carriages."

"I'm glad you like the book," said Septimus.

"Are you going to publish it?"

"Of course."

"Ask your publisher how much he'll take to let you off your bargain."

"I'm publishing it at my own expense," said Septimus, in the middle of a yawn.

"And presenting it gratis to the governments of the world?"

"Yes. I might send them copies," said Septimus. "It's a good idea."

Clem Sypher thrust his hat to the back of his head, and paced the room from the wash-stand past the dressing-table to the wardrobe and back again.

"Well, I'm hanged!" said he.

Septimus asked why.

"I thought I was a philanthropist," said Sypher, "but by the side of you I'm a vulture. Has it not struck you that, if the big gun is what I think, any government on earth would give you what you like to ask for the specification?"

"Really? Do you think they would give me a couple of hundred pounds?" asked Septimus, thinking vaguely of Mordaunt Prince in Naples and his overdrawn banking account. The anxiety of his expression was not lost on Sypher.

"Are you in need of a couple of hundred pounds?" he asked.

"Until my dividends are due. I've been speculating, and I'm afraid I haven't a head for business."

"I'm afraid you haven't," grinned Sypher, leaning over the footrail of the bed. "Next time you speculate come to me first for advice. Let me be your agent for these guns, will you?"

"I should be delighted," said Septimus, "and for the railway carriages too. There's also a motor car I've invented which goes by clockwork. You've got to wind it by means of a donkey engine. It's quite simple."

"I should think it would be," said Sypher drily. "But I'll only take on the guns just for the present."

He drew a check book from one pocket and a fountain pen from another.

"I'll advance you two hundred pounds for the sole right to deal with the thing on your behalf. My solicitors will send you a document full of verbiage which you had better send off to your solicitor to look through before you sign it. It will be all right. I'm going to take the proofs. Of course this stops publishing," he remarked, looking round from the dressing-table where he was writing the check.

Septimus assented and took the check wonderingly, remarking that he didn't in the least know what it was for.

"For the privilege of making your fortune. Good-by," said he. "Don't get up."

"Good night," said Septimus, and the door having closed behind Clem Sypher, he thrust the check beneath the bedclothes, curled himself up and went to sleep like a dormouse.



CHAPTER VIII

Clem Sypher stood at the front door of Penton Court a day or two afterwards, awaiting his guests and taking the air. The leaves of the oaks that lined the drive fell slowly under the breath of a southwest wind, and joined their sodden brethren on the path. The morning mist still hung around the branches. The sky threatened rain.

A servant came from within the house, bringing a telegram on a tray. Sypher opened it, and his strong, pink face became as overcast as the sky. It was from the London office of the Cure, and contained the information that one of his largest buyers had reduced his usual order by half. The news was depressing. So was the prospect before him, of dripping trees and of evergreens on the lawn trying to make the best of it in forlorn bravery. Heaven had ordained that the earth should be fair and Sypher's Cure invincible. Something was curiously wrong in the execution of Heaven's decrees. He looked again at the preposterous statement, knitting his brow. Surely this was some base contrivance of the enemy. They had been underselling and outadvertising him for months, and had ousted him from the custom of several large firms already. Something had to be done. As has been remarked before, Sypher was a man of Napoleonic methods. He called for a telegraph form, and wrote as he stood, with the tray as a desk:

"If you can't buy advertising rights on St. Paul's Cathedral or Westminster Abbey, secure outside pages of usual dailies for Thursday. Will draw up 'ad' myself."

He gave it to the servant, smiled in anticipation of the battle, and felt better. When Zora, Emmy, and Septimus appeared at the turn of the drive, he rushed to meet them, beaming with welcome and exuberant in phrase. This was the best housewarming that could be imagined. Just three friends to luncheon—three live people. A gathering of pale-souled folk would have converted the house into a chilly barn. They would warm it with the glow of friendship. Mrs. Middlemist, looking like a rose in June, had already irradiated the wan November garden. Miss Oldrieve he likened to a spring crocus, and Septimus (with a slap on the back) could choose the vegetable he would like to resemble. They must look over the house before lunch. Afterwards, outside, the great surprise awaited them. What was it? Ah! He turned laughing eyes on them, like a boy.

The great London firm to whom he had entrusted the furniture and decoration had done their splendid worst. The drawing-room had the appearance of an hotel sitting-room trying to look coy. An air of factitious geniality pervaded the dining-room. An engraving of Frans Hals's "Laughing Cavalier" hung with too great a semblance of jollity over the oak sideboard. Everything was too new, too ordered, too unindividual; but Sypher loved it, especially the high-art wall-paper and restless frieze. Zora, a woman of instinctive taste, who, if she bought a bedroom water-bottle, managed to identify it with her own personality, professed her admiration with a woman's pitying mendacity, but resolved to change many things for the good of Clem Sypher's soul. Emmy, still pale and preoccupied, said little. She was not in a mood to appreciate Clem Sypher, whose loud voice and Napoleonic manners jarred upon her nerves. Septimus thought it all prodigiously fine, whereat Emmy waxed sarcastic.

"I wish I could do something for you," he said, heedless of her taunts, during a moment when they were out of earshot of the others. He had already offered to go to Naples and bring back Mordaunt Prince, and had received instant orders not to be a fool. "I wish I could make you laugh again."

"I don't want to laugh," she replied impatiently. "I want to sit on the floor and howl."

They happened to be in the hall. At the farther end Septimus caught sight of a fluffy Persian kitten playing with a bit of paper, and guided by one of his queer intuitions he went and picked it up and laid its baby softness against the girl's cheek. Her mood changed magically.

"Oh, the darling!" she cried, and kissed its tiny, wet nose.

She was quite polite to Sypher during luncheon, and laughed when he told her that he called the kitten Jebusa Jones. She asked why.

"Because," said he, showing his hand covered with scratches, "she produces on the human epidermis the same effect as his poisonous cuticle remedy."

Whereupon Emmy decided that the man who could let a kitten scratch his hand in that fashion had elements of good in his nature.

"Now for the surprise," said Sypher, when Septimus and he joined the ladies after lunch. "Come."

They followed him outside, through the French windows of the drawing-room. "Other people," said he, "want houses with lawns reaching down to the side of the river or the Menai Straits or Windermere. I'm the only person, I think, who has ever sought for a lawn running down to a main line of railway."

"That's why this house was untenanted so long," said Zora.

A row of trees separated the small garden from the lawn in question. When they passed through this screen, the lawn and the line of railway and the dreamy, undulating Surrey country came into view. Also an enormous board. Why hadn't he taken it down, Zora asked.

"That's the surprise!" exclaimed Sypher eagerly. "Come round to the front."

He led the way, striding some yards ahead. Presently he turned and struck a dramatic attitude, as a man might do who had built himself a new wonder house. And then on three astonished pairs of eyes burst the following inscription in gigantic capitals which he who flew by in an express train could read:

SYPHER'S CURE! Clem Sypher. Friend of Humanity! I LIVE HERE!

"Isn't that great?" he cried. "I've had it in my mind for years. It's the personal note that's so valuable. This brings the whole passing world into personal contact with me. It shows that Sypher's Cure isn't a quack thing run by a commercial company, but the possession of a man who has a house, who lives in the very house you can see through the trees. 'What kind of a man is he?' they ask. 'He must be a nice man to live in such a nice house. I almost feel I know him. I'll try his Cure.' Don't you think it's a colossal idea?"

He looked questioningly into three embarrassed faces. Emmy, in spite of her own preoccupation, suppressed a giggle. There was a moment's silence, which was broken by Septimus's mild voice:

"I think, by means of levers running down to the line and worked by the trains as they passed, I could invent a machine for throwing little boxes of samples from the board into the railway carriage windows."

Emmy burst out laughing. "Come and show me how you would do it."

She linked her arm in his and dragged him down to the line, where she spoke with mirthful disrespect of Sypher's Cure. Meanwhile Zora said nothing to Sypher.

"Don't you like it?" he asked at last, disconcerted.

"Do you want me to be the polite lady you've asked to lunch or your friend?"

"My friend and my helper," said he.

"Then," she replied, touching his coat sleeve, "I must say that I don't like it. I hate it. I think it's everything that is most abominable."

The board was one pride of his heart, and Zora was another. He looked at them both alternately in a piteous, crestfallen way.

"But why?" he asked.

Zora's eyes filled with tears. She saw that her lack of appreciation had hurt him to the heart. She was a generous woman, and did not convict him, as she would have done another man, of blatant vulgarity. Yet she felt preposterously pained. Why could not this great, single-minded creature, with ideas as high as they were queer, perceive the board's rank abomination?

"It's unworthy of you," she said bravely. "I want everyone to respect you as I do. You see the Cure isn't everything. There's a man behind it."

"That's the object of the board," said Sypher. "To show the man."

"But it doesn't show the chivalrous gentleman that I think you are," she replied quickly. "It gives the impression of some one quite different—a horrid creature who would sell his self-respect for money. Oh, don't you understand? It's as bad as walking through the streets with 'Sypher's Cure' painted on your hat."

"What can I do about it?" he asked.

"Take it down at once," said Zora.

"But to exhibit the board was my sole reason for buying the place."

"I'm very sorry," she said gently, "but I can't change my opinion."

He cast a lingering glance at the board, and then turned. "Let us go back to the house," he said.

They walked a little way in silence. As they passed by the shrubbery at the side of the house, he gravely pushed aside a wet, hanging branch for her to proceed dry. Then he joined her again.

"You are angry with me for speaking so," said Zora.

He stopped and looked at her, his eyes bright and clear. "Do you think I'm a born fool? Do you think I can't tell loyalty when I see it, and am such an ass as not to prize it above all things? It cost you a lot to say that to me. You're right. I suppose I've lost sense of myself in the Cure. When I think of it, I seem just to be the machine that is distributing it over the earth. And that, too, I suppose, is why I want you. The board is an abomination that cries to heaven. It shall be instantly removed. There!"

He held out his hand. She gave him hers and he pressed it warmly.

"Are you going to give up the house now that it's useless?" she asked.

"Do you wish me to?"

"What have I to do with it?"

"Zora Middlemist," said he, "I'm a superstitious man in some things. You have everything to do with my success. Sooner than forfeit your respect I would set fire to every stick I possessed. I would give up everything I had in the world except my faith in the Cure."

"Wouldn't you give up that—if it were necessary so as to keep my respect?" she asked, prompted by the insane devil that lurks in the heart of even the most sainted of women and does not like its gracious habitat to be reckoned lower than a quack ointment. It is the same little devil that makes a young wife ask her devoted husband which of the two he would save if she and his mother were drowning. It is the little devil that is responsible for infinite mendacity on the part of men. "Have you ever said that to another woman?" No; of course he hasn't; and the wretch is instantly, perjured. "Would you sell your soul for me?" "My immortal soul," says the good fellow, instantaneously converted into an atrocious liar; and the little devil coos with satisfaction and curls himself up snugly to sleep.

But on this occasion the little devil had no success.

"I would give up my faith in the Cure for nothing in the wide world," said Sypher gravely.

"I'm very glad to hear it," said Zora, in her frankest tone. But the little devil asked her whether she was quite sure; whereupon she hit him smartly over the head and bade him lie down. Her respect, however, for Sypher increased.

They were joined by Emmy and Septimus.

"I think I could manage it," said the latter, "if I cut a hole a foot square in the board and fixed a magazine behind it."

"There will be no necessity," returned Sypher. "Mrs. Middlemist has ordered its immediate removal."

That was the end of the board episode. The next day he had it taken down and chopped into fire-wood, a cart-load of which he sent with his humble compliments to Mrs. Middlemist. Zora called it a burnt offering. She found more satisfaction in the blaze that roared up the chimney than she could explain to her mother; perhaps more than she could explain to herself. Septimus had first taught her the pleasantness of power. But that was nothing to this. Anybody, even Emmy, curly-headed baby that she was, could turn poor Septimus into a slave. For a woman to impose her will upon Clem Sypher, Friend of Humanity, the Colossus of Curemongers, was no such trumpery achievement.

Emmy, when she referred to the matter, expressed the hope that Zora had rubbed it into Clem Sypher. Zora deprecated the personal bearing of the slang metaphor, but admitted, somewhat grandly, that she had pointed out the error in taste.

"I can't see, though, why you take all this trouble over Mr. Sypher," said Emmy.

"I value his friendship," replied Zora, looking up from a letter she was reading.

This was at breakfast. When the maid had entered with the post Emmy had gripped the table and watched with hungry eyes, but the only letter that had come for her had been on theatrical business. Not the one she longed for. Emmy's world was out of joint.

"You've changed your opinion, my dear, as to the value of men," she sneered. "There was a time when you didn't want to see them or speak to them or have anything to do with them. Now it seems you can't get on without them."

"My dear Emmy," said Zora calmly, "men as possible lovers and men as staunch friends are two entirely different conceptions."

Emmy broke a piece of toast viciously.

"I think they're beasts," she exclaimed.

"Good heavens! Why?"

"Oh, I don't know. They are."

Then, after the quick, frightened glance of the woman who fears she has said too much, she broke into a careless half-laugh.

"They are such liars. Fawcett promised me a part in his new production and writes to-day to say I can't have it."

As Emmy's professional disappointments had been many, and as Zora in her heart of hearts did not entirely approve of her sister's musical-comedy career, she tempered her sympathy with philosophic reflections. She had never taken Emmy seriously. All her life long Emmy had been the kitten sister, with a kitten's pretty but unimportant likes, dislikes, habits, occupations, and aspirations. To regard her as being under the shadow of a woman's tragedy had never entered her head. The kitten playing Antigone, Ophelia, or such like distressed heroines, in awful, grim earnest is not a conception that readily occurs even to the most affectionate and imaginative of kitten owners. Zora accepted Emmy's explanation of her petulance with a spirit entirely unperturbed, and resumed the perusal of her letter. It was from the Callenders, who wrote from California. Zora must visit them on her way round the world.

She laid down the letter and stirred her tea absently, her mind full of snow-capped sierras, and clear blue air, and peach forests, and all the wonders of that wonderland. And Emmy stirred her tea, too, in an absent manner, but her mind was filled with the most terrible thoughts wherewith a woman's mind can be haunted.



CHAPTER IX

Septimus had never seen a woman faint before. At first he thought Emmy was dead, and rubbed agonized hands together like a fly. When he realized what had happened, he produced a large jack-knife which he always carried in his trousers pocket—for the purpose, he explained, of sharpening pencils—and offered it to Zora with the vague idea that the first aid to fainting women consisted in cutting their stay-laces. Zora rebuked him for futility, and bade him ring the bell for the maid.

It was all very sudden. The scene had been one that of late had grown so familiar: Zora and Septimus poring over world itineraries, the latter full of ineffectual suggestion and irrelevant reminiscence, and Emmy reading by the fire. On this occasion it was the Globe newspaper which Septimus, who had spent the day in London on an unexecuted errand to his publisher, had brought back with him. Evening papers being luxuries in Nunsmere, he had hidden it carefully from Wiggleswick, in order to present it to the ladies. Suddenly there was a rustle and a slither by the fire-place, and Emmy, in a dead faint, hung over the arm of the chair. In her hand she grasped the outer sheet of the paper. The inner sheet, according to the untidy ways of women with newspapers, lay discarded on the floor.

With Septimus's help Zora and the maid carried her to the sofa; they opened the window and gave her smelling salts. Septimus anxiously desired to be assured that she was not dying, and Zora thanked heaven that her mother had gone to bed. Presently Emmy recovered consciousness.

"I must have fainted," she said in a whisper.

"Yes, dear," said Zora, kneeling by her side. "Are you better?"

Emmy stared past Zora at something unseen and terrifying.

"It was foolish. The heat, I suppose. Mr. Sypher's burning board." She turned an appealing glance to Septimus. "Did I say anything silly?"

When he told her that she had slipped over the arm of the chair without a word, she looked relieved and closed her eyes. As soon as she had revived sufficiently she allowed herself to be led up-stairs; but before going she pressed Septimus's hand with feverish significance.