During these spring days there began to dawn in the girl's soul a knowledge of the deeper meaning of things. When she first met Septimus and delightedly regarded him as a new toy, she was the fluffy, frivolous little animal of excellent breeding and half education, so common in English country residential towns, with the little refinements somewhat coarsened, the little animalism somewhat developed, the little brain somewhat sharpened, by her career on the musical-comedy stage. Now there were signs of change. A glimmering notion of the duty of sacrifice entered her head. She carried it out by appearing one day, when Septimus was taking her for a drive, in the monstrous nightmare of a hat. It is not given to breathing male to appreciate the effort it cost her. She said nothing; neither did he. She sat for two hours in the victoria, enduring the tortures of the uglified, watching him out of the tail of her eye and waiting for a sign of recognition. At last she could endure it no longer.

"I put this thing on to please you," she said.

"What thing?"

"The hat you gave me."

"Oh! Is that it?" he murmured in his absent way. "I'm so glad you like it."

He had never noticed it. He had scarcely recognized it. It had given him no pleasure. She had made of herself a sight for gods and men to no earthly purpose. All her sacrifice had been in vain. It was then that she really experienced the disciplinary irony of existence. She never wore the hat again; wherein she was blameless.

The spring deepened into summer, and they stayed on in the Boulevard Raspail until they gave up making plans. Paris baked in the sun, and theaters perished, and riders disappeared from the Acacias, and Cook's brakes replaced the flashing carriages in the grand Avenue des Champs Elysees, and the great Anglo-Saxon language resounded from the Place de la Bastille to the Bon Marche. The cab horses drooped as if drugged by the vapor of the melting asphalt beneath their noses. Men and women sat by doorways, in front of little shops, on the benches in wide thoroughfares. The Latin Quarter blazed in silence and the gates of the great schools were shut. The merchants of lemonade wheeled their tin vessels through the streets and the bottles crowned with lemons looked pleasant to hot eyes. For the dust lay thick upon the leaves of trees and the lips of men, and the air was heavy with the over-fulfilment of spring's promise.

Septimus was sitting with Hegisippe Cruchot outside the little cafe of the iron tables painted yellow where first they had consorted.

"Mon ami," said he, "you are one of the phenomena that make me believe in the bon Dieu. If you hadn't dragged me from under the wheels of the cab, I should have been killed, and if I had been killed you wouldn't have introduced me to your aunt who can cook, and what I should have done without your aunt heaven only knows. I owe you much."

"Bah, mon vieux," said Hegisippe, "what are you talking about? You owe me nothing."

"I owe you three lives," said Septimus.



CHAPTER XIII

Hegisippe Cruchot laughed and twirled his little brows mustache.

"If you think so much of it," said he, "you can acquit your debt in full by offering me another absinthe to drink the health of the three."

"Why, of course," said Septimus.

Hegisippe, who was sitting next the door, twisted his head round and shouted his order to those within. It was a very modest little cafe; in fact it was not a cafe at all, but a Marchand des vins with a zinc counter inside, and a couple of iron tables outside on the pavement to convey the air of a terrasse. Septimus, with his genius for the inharmonious, drank tea; not as the elegant nowadays drink at Colombin's or Rumpelmayer's, but a dirty, gray liquid served with rum, according to the old French fashion, before five-o'cloquer became a verb in the language. When people ask for tea at a Marchand des vins, the teapot has to be hunted up from goodness knows where; and as for the tea...! Septimus, however, sipped the decoction of the dust of ages with his usual placidity. He had poured himself out a second cup and was emptying into it the remainder of the carafe of rum, so as to be ready for the toast as soon as Hegisippe had prepared his absinthe, when a familiar voice behind him caused him to start and drop the carafe itself into the teacup.

"Well, I'm blessed!" said the voice.

It was Clem Sypher, large, commanding, pink, and smiling. The sight of Septimus hobnobbing with a Zouave outside a humble wine merchant's had drawn from him the exclamation of surprise. Septimus jumped to his feet.

"My dear fellow, how glad I am to see you. Won't you sit down and join us? Have a drink."

Sypher took off his gray Homburg hat for a moment, and wiped a damp forehead.

"Whew! How anybody can stay in Paris this weather unless they are obliged to is a mystery."

"Why do you stay?" asked Septimus.

"I'm not staying. I'm passing through on my way to Switzerland to look after the Cure there. But I thought I'd look you up. I was on my way to you. I was in Nunsmere last week and took Wiggleswick by the throat and choked your address out of him. The Hotel Godet. It's somewhere about here, isn't it?"

"Over there," said Septimus, with a wave of the hand. He brought a chair from the other table. "Do sit down."

Sypher obeyed. "How's the wife?"

"The—what?" asked Septimus.

"The wife—Mrs. Dix."

"Oh, very well, thank you," he said hurriedly. "Let me introduce you to my good friend Monsieur Hegisippe Cruchot of the Zouaves—Monsieur Cruchot—Monsieur Clem Sypher."

Hegisippe saluted and declared his enchantment according to the manners of his country. Sypher raised his hat politely.

"Of Sypher's Cure—Friend of Humanity. Don't forget that," he said laughingly in French.

"Qu'est ce que c'est que ca?" asked Hegisippe, turning to Septimus. Septimus explained.

"Ah-h!" cried Hegisippe, open-mouthed, the light of recognition in his eyes. "La Cure Sypher!" He made it rhyme with "prayer." "But I know that well. And it is Monsieur who fabricates ce machin-la?"

"Yes; the Friend of Humanity. What have you used it for?"

"For my heels when they had blisters after a long day's march."

The effect of these words on Sypher was electrical. He brought both hands down on the table, leaned back in his chair, and looked at Septimus.

"Good heavens!" he cried, changing color, "it never occurred to me."

"What?"

"Why—blistered heels—marching. Don't you see? It will cure the sore feet of the Armies of the World. It's a revelation! It will be in the knapsack of every soldier who goes to manoeuvers or to war! It will be a jolly sight more useful than a marshal's baton! It will bring soothing comfort to millions of brave men! Why did I never think of it? I must go round to all the War Offices of the civilized globe. It's colossal. It makes your brain reel. Friend of Humanity? I shall be the Benefactor of the Human Race."

"What will you have to drink?" asked Septimus.

"Anything. Donnez-moi un bock," he said impatiently, obsessed by his new idea. "Tell me, Monsieur Cruchot, you who have used the Cure Sypher. It is well known in the French army is it not? You had it served out from the regimental medical stores?"

"Ah, no, Monsieur. It is my mother who rubbed it on my heels."

Sypher's face expressed disappointment, but he cheered up again immediately.

"Never mind. It is the idea that you have given me. I am very grateful to you, Monsieur Cruchot."

Hegisippe laughed. "It is to my mother you should be grateful, Monsieur."

"I should like to present her with a free order for the Cure for life—if I knew where she lived."

"That is easy," said Hegisippe, "seeing that she is concierge in the house where the belle dame of Monsieur has her appartement."

"Her appartement?" Sypher turned sharply to Septimus. "What's that? I thought you lived at the Hotel Godet."

"Of course," said Septimus, feeling very uncomfortable. "I live in the hotel, and Emmy lives in a flat. She couldn't very well stay in the Hotel Godet, because it isn't a nice place for ladies. There's a dog in the courtyard that howls. I tried to throw him some cold ham the other morning about six o'clock to stop him; but it hit a sort of dustman, who ate it and looked up for more. It was very good ham, and I was going to have it for supper."

"But, my dear man," said Sypher, laying his hand on his friend's shoulder, and paying no heed to the dog, ham, and dustman story, "aren't you two living together?"

"Oh, dear, not" said Septimus, in alarm, and then, catching at the first explanation—"you see, our hours are different."

Sypher shook his head uncomprehendingly. The proprietor of the establishment, in dingy shirt-sleeves, set down the beer before him. Hegisippe, who had mixed his absinthe and was waiting politely until their new friend should be served, raised his glass.

"Just before you came, Monsieur," said he, "I was about to drink to the health—"

"Of L'Armee-Francaise," interrupted Septimus, reaching out his glass.

"But no," laughed Hegisippe. "It was to Monsieur, Madame, et Bebe."

"Bebe?" cried Sypher, and Septimus felt his clear, swift glance read his soul.

They clinked glasses. Hegisippe, defying the laws governing the absorption of alcohols, tossed off his absinthe in swashbuckler fashion, and rose.

"Now I leave you. You have many things to talk about. My respectful compliments to Madame. Messieurs, au revoir."

He shook hands, saluted and swaggered off, his chechia at the very back of his head, leaving half his shaven crown uncovered in front.

"A fine fellow, your friend, an intelligent fellow—" said Sypher, watching him.

"He's going to be a waiter," said Septimus.

"Now that he has had his heels rubbed with the cure he may be more ambitious. A valuable fellow, for having given me a stupendous idea—but a bit indiscreet, eh? Never mind," he added, seeing the piteous look on Septimus's face. "I'll have discretion for the two of us. I'll not breathe a word of it to anybody."

"Thank you," said Septimus.

There was an awkward silence. Septimus traced a diagram on the table with the spilled tea. Sypher lighted a cigar, which he smoked in the corner of his mouth, American fashion.

"Well, I'm damned!" he muttered below his breath.

He looked hard at Septimus, intent on his tea drawing. Then he shifted his cigar impatiently to the other side of his mouth. "No, I'm damned if I am. I can't be."

"You can't be what?" asked Septimus, catching his last words.

"Damned."

"Why should you be?"

"Look here," said Sypher, "I've rushed in rather unceremoniously into your private affairs. I'm sorry. But I couldn't help taking an interest in the two of you, both for your own sake and that of Zora Middlemist."

"I suppose you would do anything for her."

"Yes."

"So would I," said Septimus, in a low voice. "There are some women one lives for and others one dies for."

"She is one of the women for whom one would live."

Septimus shook his head. "No, she's the other kind. It's much higher. I've had a lot of time to think the last few months," he continued after a pause. "I've had no one but Emmy and Hegisippe Cruchot to talk to—and I've thought a great deal about women. They usedn't to come my way, and I didn't know anything at all about them."

"Do you now?" asked Sypher, with a smile.

"Oh, a great deal," replied Septimus seriously. "It's astonishing what a lot of difference there is between them and between the ways men approach different types. One woman a man wants to take by the hand and lead, and another—he's quite content if she makes a carpet of his body and walks over it to save her feet from sharp stones. It's odd, isn't it?"

"Not very," said Sypher, who took a more direct view of things than Septimus. "It's merely because he has got a kindly feeling for one woman and is desperately in love with the other."

"Perhaps that's it," said Septimus.

Sypher again looked at him sharply, as a man does who thinks he has caught another man's soul secret. It was only under considerable stress of feeling that such coherence of ideas could have been expressed by his irrelevant friend. What he had learned the last few minutes had been a surprise, a pain, and a puzzle to him. The runaway marriage held more elements than he had imagined. He bent forward confidentially.

"You would make a carpet of your body for Zora Middlemist?"

"Why, of course," replied the other in perfect simplicity.

"Then, my friend, you're desperately in love with her."

There was kindness, help, sympathy in the big man's voice, and Septimus, though the challenge caused him agonies of shyness, did not find it in his heart to resent Sypher's logic.

"I suppose every man whom she befriends must feel the same towards her. Don't you?"

"I? I'm different. I've got a great work to carry through. I couldn't lie down for anybody to walk over me. My work would suffer—but in this mission of mine Zora Middlemist is intimately involved. I said it when I first saw her, and I said it just before she left for California. She is to stand by my side and help me. How, God knows." He laughed, seeing the bewildered face of Septimus, who had never heard of this transcendental connection of Zora with the spread of Sypher's Cure. "You seem to think I'm crazy. I'm not. I work everything on the most hard and fast common-sense lines. But when a voice inside you tells you a thing day and night, you must believe it."

Said Septimus: "If you had not met her, you wouldn't have met Hegisippe Cruchot, and so you wouldn't have got the idea of Army blisters."

Sypher clapped him on the shoulder and extolled him as a miracle of lucidity. He explained magniloquently. It was Zora's unseen influence working magnetically from the other side of the world that had led his footsteps towards the Hotel Godet on that particular afternoon. She had triumphantly vindicated her assertion that geographical location of her bodily presence could make no difference.

"I asked her to stay in England, you know," he remarked more simply, seeing that Septimus lagged behind him in his flight.

"What for?"

"Why, to help me. For what other reason?"

Septimus took off his hat and laid it on the chair vacated by Hegisippe, and ran his fingers reflectively up his hair. Sypher lit another cigar. Their side of the little street was deep in shade, but on half the road and on the other side of the way the fierce afternoon sunlight blazed. The merchant of wine, who had been lounging in his dingy shirt-sleeves against the door-post, removed the glasses and wiped the table clear of the spilled tea. Sypher ordered two more bocks for the good of the house, while Septimus, still lost in thought, brought his hair to its highest pitch of Struwel Peterdom. Passers-by turned round to look at them, for well-dressed Englishmen do not often sit outside a Marchand des vins, especially one with such hair. But passers-by are polite in France and do not salute the unfamiliar with ribaldry.

"Well," said Sypher, at last.

"We've been speaking intimately," said Septimus. He paused, then proceeded with his usual diffidence. "I've never spoken intimately to a man before, and I don't quite know how to do it—it must be just like asking a woman to marry you—but don't you think you were selfish?"

"Selfish? How?"

"In asking Zora Middlemist to give up her trip to California, just for the sake of the Cure."

"It's worth the sacrifice," Sypher maintained.

"To you, yes; but it mayn't be so to her."

"But she believes in the thing as I do myself!" cried Sypher.

"Why should she, any more than I, or Hegisippe Cruchot? If she did, she would have stayed. It would have been her duty. You couldn't expect a woman like Zora Middlemist to fail in her duty, could you?"

Sypher rubbed his eyes, as if he saw things mistily. But they were quite clear. It was really Septimus Dix who sat opposite, concentrating his discursive mind on Sypher's Cure and implicitly denying Zora's faith. A simple-minded man in many respects, he would not have scorned to learn wisdom out of the mouths of babes and sucklings; but out of the mouth of Septimus what wisdom could possibly proceed? He laughed his suggestion away somewhat blusteringly and launched out again on his panegyric of the Cure. But his faith felt a quiver all through its structure, just as a great building does at the first faint shock of earthquake.

"What made you say that about Zora Middlemist?" he asked when he had finished.

"I don't know," replied Septimus. "It seemed to be right to say it. I know when I get things into my head there appears to be room for nothing else in the world. One takes things for granted. When I was a child my father took it for granted that I believed in predestination. I couldn't; but I did not dare tell him so. So I went about with a load of somebody else's faith on my shoulders. It became intolerable; and when my father found out he beat me. He had a bit of rope tied up with twine at the end for the purpose. I shouldn't like this to happen to Zora."

This ended the discussion. The landlord at his door-post drew them into talk about the heat, the emptiness of Paris and the happy lot of those who could go into villeggiatura in the country. The arrival of a perspiring cabman in a red waistcoat and glazed hat caused him to retire within and administer to the newcomer's needs.

"One of my reasons for looking you up," said Sypher, "was to make my apologies."

"Apologies?"

"Yes. Haven't you thought about the book on guns and wondered at not hearing from me?"

"No," said Septimus. "When I've invented a thing the interest has gone. I've just invented a new sighting apparatus. I'll show you the model if you'll come to the hotel."

Sypher looked at his watch and excused himself on the ground of business engagements. Then he had to dine and start by the nine o'clock train.

"Anyhow," said he, "I'm ashamed at not having done anything with the guns. I did show the proofs to a naval expert, but he made all sorts of criticisms which didn't help. Experts know everything that is known and don't want to know anything that isn't. So I laid it aside."

"It doesn't matter in the least," said Septimus eagerly, "and if you want to break the contract you sent me, I can pay you back the two hundred pounds." But Sypher assured him that he had never broken a contract in his life, and they shook hands and went their respective ways, Septimus to the appartement in the Boulevard Raspail, and Sypher thoughtfully in the direction of the Luxembourg.

He was sorry, very sorry for Septimus Dix. His kindness of heart had not allowed him to tell the brutal truth about the guns. The naval expert had scoffed in the free manner of those who follow the sea and declared the great guns a mad inventor's dream. The Admiralty was overwhelmed with such things. The proofs were so much waste paper. Sypher had come prepared to break the news as gently as he could; but after all their talk it was not in his heart to do so. And the two hundred pounds—he regarded it as money given to a child to play with. He would never claim it. He was sorry, very sorry for Septimus. He looked back along the past year and saw the man's dog-like devotion to Zora Middlemist. But why did he marry Emmy, loving the sister as he did? Why live apart from her, having married her? And the child? It was all a mystery in which he did not see clear. He pitied the ineffectuality of Septimus with the kind yet half-contemptuous pity of the strong man with a fine nature. But as for his denial of Zora's faith, he laughed it away. Egotistical, yes. Zora had posed the same question as Septimus and he had answered it. But her faith in the Cure itself, his mission to spread it far and wide over the earth, and to save the nations from vulgar competitors who thought of nothing but sordid gain—that, he felt sure, remained unshaken.

Yet as he walked along, in the alien though familiar city, he was smitten, as with physical pain, by a craving for her presence, for the gleam of her eyes, for the greatness of sympathy and comprehension that inhabited her generous and beautiful frame. The need of her was imperious. He stopped at a cafe on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, called for the wherewithal to write, and like a poet in the fine frenzy of inspiration, poured out his soul to her over the heels of the armies of the world.

He had walked a great deal during the day. When he stepped out of the cab that evening at the Gare de Lyon, he felt an unfamiliar stinging in his heel. During the process of looking after his luggage and seeking his train he limped about the platform. When he undressed for the night in his sleeping compartment, he found that a ruck in his sock had caused a large blister. He regarded it with superstitious eyes, and thought of the armies of the world. In hoc signo vinces! The message had come from heaven.

He took a sample box of Sypher's Cure from his handbag, and, almost with reverence, anointed his heel.



CHAPTER XIV

Clem Sypher slept the sleep of the warrior preparing for battle. When he awoke at Lyons he had all the sensations of a wounded Achilles. His heel smarted and tingled and ached, and every time he turned over determined on a continuation of slumber, his foot seemed to occupy the whole width of the berth. He reanointed himself and settled down again. But wakefulness had gripped him. He pulled up the blinds of the compartment and let the dawn stream in, and, lying on his back, gave himself up to the plans of his new campaign. The more he thought out the scheme the simpler it became. He had made it his business to know personages of high influence in every capital in Europe. Much of his success had already been gained that way. The methods of introduction had concerned him but little. For social purposes they could have been employed only by a pushing upstart; but in the furtherance of a divine mission the apostle does not bind his inspired feet with the shackles of ordinary convention. Sypher rushed in, therefore, where the pachyderms of Park Lane would have feared to tread. Just as the fanatical evangelist has no compunction in putting to an entire stranger embarrassing questions as to his possession of the Peace of God, so had Sypher no scruple in approaching any foreigner of distinguished mien in an hotel lounge and converting him to the religion of Sypher's Cure. In most cosmopolitan resorts his burly figure and pink face were well known. Newspapers paragraphed his arrival and departure. People pointed him out to one another in promenades. Distinguished personages to whom he had casually introduced himself introduced him to other distinguished personages. When he threw off the apostle and became the man, his simple directness and charm of manner caused him to be accepted pleasurably for his own sake. Had he chosen to take advantage of his opportunities he might have consorted with very grand folks indeed; at a price, be it said, which his pride refused to pay. But he had no social ambitions. The grand folks therefore respected him and held out a cordial hand as he passed by. That very train was carrying to Switzerland a Russian Grand Duke who had greeted him with a large smile and a "Ah! ce bon Sypher!" on the platform of the Gare de Lyon, and had presented him as the Friend of Humanity to the Grand Duchess.

To Sypher, lying on his back and dreaming of the days when through him the forced marches of weary troops would become light-hearted strolls along the road, the jealously guarded portals of the War Offices of the world presented no terrors. He ticked off the countries in his mind until he came to Turkey. Whom did he know in Turkey? He had once given a certain Musurus Bey a light for his cigarette in the atrium of the Casino at Monte Carlo; but that could scarcely be called an introduction. No matter; his star was now in the ascendant. The Lord would surely provide a Turk for him in Geneva. He shifted his position in the berth, and a twinge of pain passed through his foot, hurting horribly.

When he rose to dress, he found some difficulty in putting on his boot. On leaving the train at Geneva he could scarcely walk. In his room at the hotel he anointed his heel again with the Cure, and, glad to rest, sat by the window looking at the blue lake and Mont Blanc white-capped in the quivering distance, his leg supported on a chair. Then his traveler, who had arranged to meet him by appointment, was shown into the room. They were to lunch together. To ease his foot Sypher put on an evening slipper and hobbled downstairs.

The traveler told a depressing tale. Jebusa Jones had got in everywhere and was underselling the Cure. A new German skin remedy had insidiously crept on to the market. Wholesale houses wanted impossible discounts, and retail chemists could not be inveigled into placing any but the most insignificant orders. He gave dismaying details, terribly anxious all the while lest his chief should attribute to his incompetence the growing unpopularity of the Cure. But to his amazement Sypher listened smilingly to his story of disaster, and ordered a bottle of champagne.

"All that is nothing!" he cried. "A flea bite in the ocean. It will right itself as the public realize how they are being taken in by these American and German impostors. The Cure can't fail. And let me tell you, Dennymede, my son, the Cure is going to flourish as it has never flourished before. I've got a scheme that will take your breath away."

The glow of inspiration in Sypher's blue eyes and the triumph written on his resolute face brought the features of the worried traveler for the first time into an expression of normal satisfaction with the world.

"I will stagger you to your commercial depths, my boy," Sypher continued. "Have a drink first before I tell you."

He raised his champagne glass. "To Sypher's Cure!" They drank the toast solemnly.

And then Sypher unfolded to his awe-stricken subordinate the scheme for deblistering the heels of the armies of the world. Dennymede, fired by his enthusiasm, again lifted his brimming glass.

"By God, sir, you are a conqueror, an Alexander, a Hannibal, a Napoleon! There's a colossal fortune in it."

"And it will give me enough money," said Sypher, "to advertise Jebusa Jones and the others off the face of the earth."

"You needn't worry about them, sir, when you've got the army contracts," said the traveler.

He could not follow the spirituality underlying his chief's remark. Sypher laid down the peach he was peeling and looked pityingly at Dennymede as at one of little faith, one born to the day of small things.

"It will be all the more my duty to do so," said he, "when the instruments are placed in my hands. What, after all, is the healing of a few blistered feet, compared with the scourge of leprosy, eczema, itch, psoriasis, and what not? And, as for the money itself, what is it?"

He preached his sermon. The securing of the world's army contracts was only a means towards the shimmering ideal. It would clear the path of obstacles and leave the Cure free to pursue its universal way as consolatrix afflictorum.

The traveler finished his peach, and accepted another which his host hospitably selected for him.

"All the same, sir," said he, "this is the biggest thing you've struck. May I ask how you came to strike it?"

"Like all great schemes, it had humble beginnings," said Sypher, in comfortable postprandial mood, unconsciously flattered by the admiration of his subordinate. "Newton saw an apple drop to the ground: hence the theory of gravitation. The glory of Tyre and Sidon arose from the purple droppings of a little dog's mouth who had been eating shell fish. The great Cunarders came out of the lid of Stephenson's family kettle. A soldier happened to tell me that his mother had applied Sypher's Cure to his blistered heels—and that was the origin of the scheme."

He leaned back in his chair, stretched out his legs and put one foot over the other. He immediately started back with a cry of pain.

"I was forgetting my own infernal blister," said he. "About a square inch of skin is off and all the flesh round, it is as red as a tomato."

"You'll have to be careful," advised the traveler. "What are you using for it?"

"Using for it? Why, good heavens, man, the Cure! What else?"

He regarded Dennymede as if he were insane,' and Dennymede in his confusion blushed as red as the blistered heel.

They spent the afternoon over the reports and figures which had so greatly depressed the traveler. He left his chief with hopes throbbing in his breast. He had been promised a high position in the new Army Contract Department. As soon as he had gone Sypher rubbed in more of the Cure.

He passed a restless night. In the morning he found the ankle considerably swollen. He could scarcely put his foot to the ground. He got into bed again and rang the bell for the valet de chambre. The valet entered. Sypher explained. He had a bad foot and wanted to see a doctor. Did the valet know of a good doctor? The valet not only knew of a good doctor, but an English doctor resident in Geneva who was always summoned to attend English and American visitors at the hotel; furthermore, he was in the hotel at that very moment.

"Ask him if he would kindly step up," said Sypher.

He looked ruefully at his ankle, which was about the size of his calf, wondering why the Cure had not effected its advertised magic. The inflammation, however, clearly required medical advice. In the midst of his ruefulness the doctor, a capable-looking man of five and thirty, entered the room. He examined the heel and ankle with professional scrutiny. Then he raised his head.

"Have you been treating it in any way?"

"Yes," said Sypher, "with the Cure."

"What Cure?"

"Why, Sypher's Cure."

The doctor brought his hand down on the edge of the footboard of the bed, with a gesture of impatience.

"Why on earth do people treat themselves with quack remedies they know nothing about?"

"Quack remedies!" cried Sypher.

"Of course. They're all pestilential, and if I had my way I'd have them stacked in the market place and burned by the common hangman. But the most pestilential of the lot is Sypher's Cure. You ought never to have used it."

Sypher had the sensation of the hotel walls crashing down upon his head, falling across his throat and weighing upon his chest. For a few instants he suffered a nightmare paralysis. Then he gasped for breath. At last he said very quietly:

"Do you know who I am?"

"I have not the pleasure," said the doctor. "They only gave me your room number."

"I am Clem Sypher, the proprietor of Sypher's Cure."

The two men stared at one another, Sypher in a blue-striped pyjama jacket, supporting himself by one elbow on the bed, the doctor at the foot. The doctor spread out his hands.

"It's the most horrible moment of my life. I am at your mercy. I only gave you my honest opinion, the result of my experience. If I had known your name—naturally—"

"You had better go," said Sypher in a queer voice, digging the nails into the palms of his hands. "Your fee—?"

"There is no question of it. I am only grieved to the heart at having wounded you. Good morning."

The door closed behind him, and Sypher gave himself up to his furious indignation.

* * * * *

This soothed the soul but further inflamed the ankle. He called up the manager of the hotel and sent for the leading medical man in Geneva. When he arrived he took care to acquaint him with his name and quality. Dr. Bourdillot, professor of dermatology in the University of Geneva, made his examination, and shook a tactful head. With all consideration for the many admirable virtues of la cure Sypher, yet there were certain maladies of the skin for which he personally would not prescribe it. For this, for that—he rattled off half a dozen of learned diseases—it might very well be efficacious. Its effect would probably be benign in a case of elephantiasis. But in a case of abrasion of the cuticle, where there was a large surface of raw flesh laid bare, perhaps a simpler treatment might be more desirable.

His tone was exquisite, and he chose his language so that not a word could wound. Sypher listened to him with a sinking heart.

"In your opinion then, doctor," said he, "it isn't a good thing for blistered heels?"

"You ask for my opinion," replied the professor of dermatology at the University of Geneva. "I give it you. No."

Sypher threw out a hand, desperately argumentative.

"But I know of a case in which it has proved efficacious. A Zouave of my acquaintance—"

Dr. Bourdillot smiled. "A Zouave? Just as nothing is sacred to a sapper, so is nothing hurtful to a Zouave. They have hides like hippopotamuses, those fellows. You could dip them in vitriol and they wouldn't feel it."

"So his heels recovered in spite of the Cure?" said Sypher, grimly.

"Evidently," said Dr. Bourdillot.

* * * * *

Sypher sat in his room for a couple of days, his leg on a chair, and looked at Mont Blanc, exquisite in its fairy splendor against the far, pale sky. It brought him no consolation. On the contrary it reminded him of Hannibal and other conquerors leading their footsore armies over the Alps. When he allowed a despondent fancy to wander uncontrolled, he saw great multitudes of men staggering shoeless along with feet and ankles inflamed to the color of tomatoes. Then he pulled himself together and set his teeth. Dennymede came to visit him and heard with dismay the verdict of science, which crushed his hope of a high position in the new Army Contract Department. But Sypher reassured him as to his material welfare by increasing his commission on foreign sales; whereupon he began to take a practical view of the situation.

"We can't expect a patent medicine, sir, to do everything."

"I quite agree with you," said Sypher. "It can't make two legs grow where one grew before, but it ought to cure blisters on the heel. Apparently it won't. So we are where we were before I met Monsieur Hegisippe Cruchot. The only thing is that we mustn't now lead people to suppose that it's good for blisters."

"They must take their chance," said Dennymede. He was a sharp, black-haired young man, with a worried brow and a bilious complexion. The soothing of the human race with Sypher's Balm of Gilead mattered nothing to him. His atrabiliar temperament rendered his attitude towards humanity rather misanthropic than otherwise. "Indeed," he continued, "I don't see why you shouldn't try for the army contracts without referring specifically to sore feet."

"Caveat emptor," said Sypher.

"I beg your pardon?" said Dennymede, who had no Latinity.

"It means, let the buyer beware; it's up to the buyer to see what stuff he's buying."

"Naturally. It's the first principle of business."

Sypher turned his swift clear glance on him and banged the window-ledge with his hand.

"It's the first principle of damned knavery and thieving," he cried, "and if I thought anyone ran my business on it, they'd go out of my employ at once! It's at the root of all the corruption that exists in modern trade. It salves the conscience of the psalm-singing grocer who puts ground beans into his coffee. It's a damnable principle."

He thumped the window-ledge again, very angry. The traveler hedged.

"Of course it's immoral to tell lies and say a thing is what it isn't. But on the other hand no one could run a patent medicine on the lines of warning the public as to what it isn't good for. You say on the wrapper it will cure gout and rheumatism. If a woman buys a bottle and gives it to her child who has got scarlet fever, and the child dies from it, it's her lookout and not yours. When a firm does issue a warning such as 'Won't Wash Clothes,' it's a business proceeding for the firm's own protection."

"Well, we'll issue a warning, 'Won't Cure Blisters,'" said Sypher. "I advertise myself as the Friend of Humanity. I am, according to my lights. If I let poor fellows on the march reduce their feet to this condition I should be the scourge of mankind like"—he snapped his fingers trying to recall the name—"like Atlas—no it wasn't Atlas, but no matter. Not a box of the Cure has been sold without the guarantee stamp of my soul's conviction on it."

"The Jebusa Jones people aren't so conscientious," said Dennymede. "I bought a pot of their stuff this morning. They've got a new wrapper. See." He unfolded a piece of paper and pointed out the place to his chief. "They have a special paragraph in large print: 'Gives instant relief to blistered feet. Every mountaineer should carry it in his gripsack.'"

"They're the enemies of God and man," said Sypher, "and sooner than copy their methods I would close down the factory and never sell another box as long as I lived."

"It's a thousand pities, sir, anyhow," said Dennymede, trying to work back diplomatically, "that the army contract scheme has to be thrown overboard."

"Yes, it's a nuisance," said Sypher.

When he had dismissed the traveler he laughed grimly. "A nuisance!"

The word was a grotesque anticlimax.

He sat for a long while with his hands blinding his eyes, trying to realize what the abandonment of the scheme meant to him. He was a man who faced his responsibilities squarely. For the first time in his life he had tried the Cure seriously on himself—chance never having given him cause before—and it had failed. He had heard the Cure which he regarded as a divine unction termed a pestilential quackery; the words burned red-hot in his brain. He had heard it depreciated, with charming tact and courtesy, by a great authority on diseases of the skin. One short word, "no," had wiped out of existence his Napoleonic scheme for the Armies of the World—for putting them on a sound footing. He smiled bitterly as the incongruous jest passed through his mind.

He had been fighting for months, and losing ground; but this was the first absolute check that his faith had received. He staggered under it, half wonderingly, like a man who has been hit by an unseen hand and looks around to see whence the blow came. Why should it come now? He looked back along the years. Not a breath of disparagement had touched the Cure's fair repute. His files in London were full of testimonials honorably acquired. Some of these, from lowly folk, were touching in their simple gratitude. It is true that his manager suggested that the authors had sent them in the hope of gain and of seeing their photographs in the halfpenny papers. But his manager, Shuttleworth, was a notorious and dismal cynic who believed in nothing save the commercial value of the Cure. Letters had come with coroneted flaps to the envelopes. The writers certainly hoped neither for gain nor for odd notoriety. He had never paid a fee for a testimonial throughout his career; every one that he printed was genuine and unsolicited. He had been hailed as the Friend of Humanity by all sorts and conditions of men. Why suddenly should he be branded as a dealer in pestilence?

His thought wandered back to the beginning of things. He saw himself in the chemist's shop in Bury Saint Edmunds—a little shop in a little town, too small, he felt, for the great unknown something within him that was craving for expansion. The dull making up of prescriptions, the selling of tooth powder and babies' feeding bottles—the deadly mechanical routine—he remembered the daily revolt against it all. He remembered his discovery of the old herbalists; his delight in their quaint language; the remedies so extraordinary and yet so simple; his first idea of combining these with the orthodox drugs of the British Pharmacopoeia; his experiments; his talks with an aged man who kept a dingy little shop of herbs on the outskirts of the town, also called a pestilential fellow by the medical faculty of the district, but a learned ancient all the same, who knew the qualities of every herb that grew, and with some reeking mess of pulp was said to have cured an old woman's malignant ulcer given up as incurable by the faculty. He remembered the night when the old man, grateful for the lad's interest in his learning, gave him under vows of secrecy the recipe of this healing emulsion, which was to become the basis of Sypher's Cure. In those days his loneliness was cheered by a bulldog, an ugly, faithful beast whom he called Barabbas—he sighed to think how many Barabbases had lived and died since then—and who, contracting mange, became the corpus vile of many experiments—first with the old man's emulsion, then with the emulsion mixed with other drugs, all bound together in pure animal fat, until at last he found a mixture which to his joy made the sores heal and the skin harden and the hair sprout and Barabbas grow sleek as a swell mobsman in affluent circumstances. Then one day came His Grace of Suffolk into the shop with a story of a pet of the Duchess's stricken with the same disease. Sypher modestly narrated his own experience and gave the mighty man a box of the new ointment. A fortnight afterwards he returned. Not only had it cured the dog, but it must have charmed away the eczema on his ducal hands. Full of a wild surmise he tried it next on his landlady's child, who had a sore on its legs, and lo! the sore healed. It was then that the Divine Revelation came to him; it was then that he passed his vigil, as he had told Zora, and consecrated himself and his Cure to the service of humanity.

The steps, the struggles, the purchase of the chemist's business, the early exploitation of the Cure, its gradual renown in the district, the first whisperings of its fame abroad, thanks to His Grace of Suffolk, the early advertising, the gradual growth, the sale of the chemist's business, the establishment of "Sypher's Cure" as a special business in the town, the transference to London, the burst into world-wide fame—all the memories came back to him, as he sat by the window of the Hotel de l'Europe and blinded his face with his hands.

He dashed them away, at last, with a passionate gesture.

"It can't be! It can't be!" he cried aloud, as many another man has cried in the righteous rebellion of his heart against the ironical decrees of the high gods whom his simple nature has never suspected of their eternal and inscrutable irony.



CHAPTER XV

If you travel on the highroad which skirts the cliff-bound coast of Normandy you may come to a board bearing the legend "Hottetot-sur-Mer" and a hand pointing down a narrow gorge. If you follow the direction and descend for half a mile you come to a couple of villas, a humble cafe, some fishermen's cottages, one of which is also a general shop and a debit de tabac, a view of a triangle of sea, and eventually to a patch of shingly beach between two great bastions of cliffs. The beach itself contains a diminutive jetty, a tiny fleet of fishing smacks, some nets, three bathing machines joined together by ropes on which hang a few towels and bathing costumes, a dog, a child or so with spade and bucket, two English maiden ladies writing picture post-cards, a Frenchman in black, reading a Rouen newspaper under a gray umbrella, his wife and daughter, and a stall of mussels presided over by an old woman with skin like seaweed. Just above the beach, on one side of the road leading up the gorge, is a miniature barn with a red cupola, which is the Casino, and, on the other, a long, narrow, blue-washed building with the words written in great black letters across the facade, "Hotel de la Plage."

As soon as Emmy could travel, she implored Septimus to find her a quiet spot by the sea whither the fashionable do not resort. Septimus naturally consulted Hegisippe Cruchot. Hegisippe asked for time to consult his comrades. He returned with news of an ideal spot. It was a village in the Pyrenees about six thousand feet up in the air and forty miles from a railway station. They could shoot bears all day long. When Emmy explained that a village on the top of the Pyrenees was not by the seaside, and that neither she nor his aunt, Madame Bolivard, took any interest in the destruction of bears, he retired somewhat crestfallen and went with his difficulties to Angelique, the young lady in the wine shop in the Rue des Francs-Bouchers. Angelique informed him that a brave sailor on leave from his torpedo boat was in the habit of visiting the wine shop every evening. He ought to know something of the sea. A meeting was arranged by Angelique between Hegisippe, Septimus and the brave sailor, much to Emmy's skeptical amusement; and the brave sailor, after absorbing prodigious quantities of alcohol and reviewing all the places on the earth's coastline from Yokohama to Paris-Plage, declared that the veritable Eden by the Sea was none other than his native village of Hottetot-sur-Mer. He made a plan of it on the table, two square packets of tobacco representing the cliffs, a pipe stem the road leading up the gorge, some tobacco dust the beach, and some coffee slops applied with the finger the English Channel.

Septimus came back to Emmy. "I have found the place. It is Hottetot-sur-Mer. It has one hotel. You can catch shrimps, and its mussels are famous all over the world."

After consultation of a guide to Normandy, on which Emmy's prudence insisted, they found the brave sailor's facts mainly correct, and decided on Hottetot-sur-Mer.

"I will take you there, see that you are comfortably settled, and then come back to Paris," said Septimus. "You'll be quite happy with Madame Bolivard, won't you?"

"Of course," said Emmy, looking away from him. "What are you going to do in Paris, all by yourself?"

"Guns," he replied. Then he added reflectively: "I also don't see how I can get out of the Hotel Godet. I've been there some time, and I don't know how much to give the servants in tips. The only thing is to stay on."

Emmy sighed, just a bit wistfully, and made no attempt to prove the futility of his last argument. The wonderfully sweet of life had come to her of late mingled with the unutterably bitter. She was in the state of being when a woman accepts, without question. Septimus then went to the St. Lazare station to make arrangements and discovered an official who knew a surprising amount about railway traveling and the means of bringing a family from domicile to station. He entered Septimus's requirements in a book and assured him that at the appointed hour an omnibus would be waiting outside the house in the Boulevard Raspail. Septimus thought him a person of marvelous intellect and gave him five francs.

So the quaint quartette started in comfort: Septimus and Emmy and Madame Bolivard and the little lump of mortality which the Frenchwoman carried in her great motherly arms. Madame Bolivard, who had not been out of Paris for twenty years, needed all her maternal instincts to subdue her excitement at the prospect of seeing the open country and the sea. In the railway carriage she pointed out cattle to the unconscious infant with the tremulous quiver of the traveler who espies a herd of hippogriffin.

"Is it corn that, Monsieur? Mon Dieu, it is beautiful. Regard then the corn, my cherished one."

But the cherished one cared not for corn or cattle. He preferred to fix his cold eyes on Septimus, as if wondering what he was doing in that galley. Now and again Septimus would bend forward and, with a vague notion of the way to convey one's polite intentions to babies, would prod him gingerly in the cheek and utter an insane noise and then surreptitiously wipe his finger on his trousers. When his mother took him she had little spasms of tenderness during which she pressed him tightly to her bosom and looked frightened. The child was precious to her. She had paid a higher price than most women, and that perhaps enhanced its value.

At Fecamp a rusty ramshackle diligence awaited them. Their luggage, together with hen-coops, baskets, bundles, packing-cases, were piled on top in an amorphous heap. They took their places inside together with an old priest and a peasant woman in a great flapping cap. The old priest absorbed snuff in great quantities and used a red handkerchief. The closed windows of the vehicle rattled, it was very hot, and the antiquated cushions smelled abominably. Emmy, tired of the railway journey and suffocated by the heat, felt inclined to cry. This was her first step into her newly conditioned world, and her heart sank. She regretted her comfortable rooms in Paris and the conditions of existence there of which Septimus was an integral part. She had got used to them, to his forced association with the intimate details of her life, to his bending over the child like a grotesque fairy godfather and making astonishing suggestions for its upbringing. She had regarded him less as a stranger to be treated with feminine reserve than the doctor. Now it was different. She was about to take up her own life again, with new responsibilities, and the dearly loved creature whom she had bullied and laughed at and leaned on would go away to take up his own queer way of life, and the relations between them could not possibly be the same again. The diligence was taking her on the last stage of her journey towards the new conditions, and it jolted and bumped and smelled and took an interminable time.

"I'm sure," said she woefully, "there's no such place as Hottetot-sur-Mer, and we are going on forever to find it."

Presently Septimus pointed triumphantly through the window.

"There it is!"

"Where?" cried Emmy, for not a house was in sight. Then she saw the board.

The old diligence turned and creaked and swung and pitched down the gorge. When they descended at the Hotel de la Plage, the setting sun blazed on their faces across the sea and shed its golden enchantment over the little pebbly beach. At that hour the only living thing on it was the dog, and he was asleep. It was a spot certainly to which the fashionable did not resort.

"It will be good for baby."

"And for you."

She shrugged her shoulders. "What is good for one is not always—" She paused, feeling ungrateful. Then she added, "It's the best place you could have brought us to."

After dinner they sat on the beach and leaned against a fishing-boat. It was full moon. The northern cliff cast its huge shadow out to sea and half way across the beach. A knot of fisher folk sat full in the moonlight on the jetty and sang a song with a mournful refrain. Behind them in the square of yellow light of the salon window could be seen the figures of the two English maiden ladies apparently still addressing picture post-cards. The luminous picture stood out sharp against the dark mass of the hotel. Beyond the shadow of the cliff the sea lay like a silver mirror in the windless air. A tiny border of surf broke on the pebbles. Emmy drew a long breath and asked Septimus if he smelled the seaweed. The dog came and sniffed at their boots; then from the excellent leather judging them to be persons above his social station, he turned humbly away. Septimus called him, made friends with him—he was a smooth yellow dog of no account—and eventually he curled himself up between them and went to sleep. Septimus smoked his pipe. Emmy played with the ear of the dog and looked out to sea. It was very peaceful. After a while she sighed.

"I suppose this must be our last evening together."

"I suppose it must," said Septimus.

"Are you quite sure you can afford all the money you're leaving with me?"

"Of course. It comes out of the bank."

"I know that, you stupid," she laughed. "Where else could it come from unless you kept it in a stocking? But the bank isn't an unlimited gold-mine from which you can draw out as many handfuls as you want."

Septimus knocked the ashes out of his pipe.

"People don't get sovereigns out of gold-mines. I wish they did. They extract a bit of gold about the size of this pebble out of a ton of quartz. I once bought shares in a gold-mine and there wasn't any gold in it at all. I always used to be buying things like that. People sold them to me. I was like Moses."

"Moses?"

"Oh, not that Moses. He could get anything out of anything. He got water out of a rock. I mean the son of the Vicar of Wakefield, who bought the green spectacles."

"Oh," said Emmy, who after the way of her generation had never heard of him.

"I don't do it—let people sell me things—any more, now," he said gravely. "I seem to have got wise. Perhaps it has come through having had to look after you. I see things much clearer."

He filled and lit another pipe and began to talk about Orion just visible over the shoulder of the cliff. Emmy, whose interests were for the moment terrestrial, interrupted him:

"There's one thing I want you to see clearly, my dear, and that is that I owe you a frightful lot of money. But I'm sure to get something to do when I'm back in London and then I can repay you by instalments. Remember, I'm not going to rest until I pay you back."

"I sha'n't rest if you do," said Septimus, nervously. "Please don't talk of it. It hurts me. I've done little enough in the world, God knows. Give me this chance of—the Buddhists call it 'acquiring merit.'"

This was not a new argument between them. Emmy had a small income under her father's will, and the prospect of earning a modest salary on the stage. She reckoned that she would have sufficient to provide for herself and the child. Hitherto Septimus had been her banker. Neither of them had any notion of the value of money, and Septimus had a child's faith in the magic of the drawn check. He would as soon have thought of measuring the portion of whisky he poured out for a guest as of counting the money he advanced to Emmy.

She took up his last words, and speaking in a low tone, as a woman does when her pride has gone from her, she said:

"Haven't you acquired enough merit already, my dear? Don't you see the impossibility of my going on accepting things from you? You seem to take it for granted that you're to provide for me and the child for the rest of our lives. I've been a bad, unprincipled fool of a girl, I know—yes, rotten bad; there are thousands like me in London—"

Septimus rose to his feet.

"Oh, don't, Emmy, don't! I can't stand it."

She rose too and put her hands on his shoulders.

"You must let me speak to-night—our last night before we part. It isn't generous of you not to listen."

The yellow dog, disturbed in his slumbers, shook himself, and regarding them with an air of humble sympathy turned and walked away discreetly into the shadow. The fisher folk on the jetty still sang their mournful chorus.

"Sit down again."

Septimus yielded. "But why give yourself pain?" he asked gently.

"To ease my heart. The knife does good. Yes, I know I've been worthless. But I'm not as bad as that. Don't you see how horrible the idea is to me? I must pay you back the money—and of course not come on you for any more. You've done too much for me already. It sometimes stuns me to think of it. It was only because I was in hell and mad—and grasped at the hand you held out to me. I suppose I've done you the biggest wrong a woman can do a man. Now I've come to my senses, I shudder at what I've done."

"Why? Why?" said Septimus, growing miserably unhappy.

"How can you ever marry, unless we go through the vulgarity of a collusive divorce?"

"My dear girl," said he, "what woman would ever marry a preposterous lunatic like me?"

"There's not a woman living who ought not to have gone down on her bended knees if she had married you."

"I should never have married," said he, laying his hand for a moment reassuringly on hers.

"Who knows?" She gave a slight laugh. "Zora is only a woman like the rest of us."

"Why talk of Zora?" he said quickly. "What has she to do with it?"

"Everything. You don't suppose I don't know," she replied in a low voice. "It was for her sake and not for mine."

He was about to speak when she put out her hand and covered his mouth.

"Let me talk for a little."

She took up her parable again and spoke very gently, very sensibly. The moonlight peacefulness was in her heart. It softened the tone of her voice and reflected itself in unfamiliar speech.

"I seem to have grown twenty years older," she said.

She desired on that night to make her gratitude clear to him, to ask his pardon for past offenses. She had been like a hunted animal; sometimes she had licked his hand and sometimes she had scratched it. She had not been quite responsible. Sometimes she had tried to send him away, for his own sake. For herself, she had been terrified at the thought of losing him.

"Another man might have done what you did, out of chivalry; but no other man but you would not have despised the woman. I deserved it; but I knew you didn't despise me. You have been just the same to me all through as you were in the early days. It braced me up and helped me to keep some sort of self-respect. That was the chief reason why I could not let you go. Now all is over. I am quite sane and as happy as I ever shall be. After to-night it stands to reason we must each lead our separate lives. You can't do anything more for me, and God knows, poor dear, I can't do anything for you. So I want to thank you."

She put her arm around his shoulder and kissed his cheek.

Septimus flushed. Her lips were soft and her breath was sweet. No woman save his mother had ever kissed him. He turned and took her hands.

"Let me accept that in full payment for everything. You want me to go away happy, don't you?"

"My dear," she said, with a little catch in her voice, "if there was anything in the world I could do to make you happy, short of throwing baby to a tiger, I would do it."

Septimus took off his cap and brought his hair to its normal perpendicularity. Emmy laughed.

"Dear me! What are you going to say?"

Septimus reflected for a moment.

"If I dine off a bloater in a soup-plate in the drawing-room, or if my bed isn't made at six o'clock in the evening, and my house is a cross between a pigsty and an ironmonger's shop, nobody minds. It is only Septimus Dix's extraordinary habits. But if the woman who is my wife in the eyes of the world—"

"Yes, yes, I see," she said hurriedly. "I hadn't looked at it in that light."

"The boy is going to Cambridge," he murmured. "Then I should like him to go into Parliament. There are deuced clever fellows in Parliament. I met one in Venice two or three years ago. He knew an awful lot of things. We spent an evening together on the Grand Canal and he talked all the time most interestingly on the drainage system of Barrow-in-Furness. I wonder how fellows get to know about drains."

Emmy said: "Would it make you happy?"

From her tone he gathered that she referred to the subject of contention between them and not to his thirst for sanitary information.

"Of course it would."

"But how shall I ever repay you?"

"Perhaps once a year," he said. "You can settle up in full, as you did just now."

There was a long silence and then Emmy remarked that it was a heavenly night.



CHAPTER XVI

In the course of time Sypher returned to London to fight a losing battle against the Powers of Darkness and derive whatever inspiration he could from Zora's letters. He also called dutifully at "The Nook" during his week-end visits to Penton Court, where he found restfulness in the atmosphere of lavender. Mrs. Oldrieve continued to regard him as a most superior person. Cousin Jane, as became a gentlewoman of breeding, received him with courtesy—but a courtesy marked by that shade of reserve which is due from a lady of quality to the grandfatherless. If she had not striven against the unregeneracy of mortal flesh she would have disapproved of him offhand because she disapproved of Zora; but she was a conscientious woman, and took great pride in overcoming prejudices. She also collected pewter, the history of which Sypher, during his years of self-education, had once studied, in the confused notion that it was culture. All knowledge is good; from the theory of quaternions to the way to cut a ham-frill. It is sure to come in useful, somehow. An authority on Central African dialects has been known to find them invaluable in altercations with cabmen, and a converted burglar has, before now, become an admirable house-agent. What Sypher, therefore, had considered merely learned lumber in his head cemented his friendship with Cousin Jane—or rather, to speak by the book, soldered it with pewter. As for the Cure, however, she did not believe in it, and told him so, roundly. She had been brought up to believe in doctors, the Catechism, the House of Lords, the inequality of the sexes, and the Oldrieve family, and in that faith she would live and die. Sypher bore her no malice. She did not call the Cure pestilential quackery. He was beginning not to despise the day of small things.

"It may be very good in its way," she said, "just as Liberalism and Darwinism and eating in restaurants may be good things. But they are not for me."

Cousin Jane's conversation provided him with much innocent entertainment. Mrs. Oldrieve was content to talk about the weather, and what Zora and Emmy used to like to eat when they were little girls: subjects interesting in themselves but not conducive to discussion. Cousin Jane was nothing if not argumentative. She held views, expounded them, and maintained them. Nothing short of a declaration from Jehovah bursting in glory through the sky could have convinced her of error. Even then she would have been annoyed. She profoundly disapproved of Emmy's marriage to Septimus, whom she characterized as a doddering idiot. Sypher defended his friend warmly. He also defended Wiggleswick at whose ways and habits the good lady expressed unrestrained indignation. She could not have spoken more disrespectfully of Antichrist.

"You mark my words," she said, "he'll murder them both in their sleep."

Concerning Zora, too, she was emphatic.

"I am not one of those who think every woman ought to get married; but if she can't conduct herself decently without a husband, she ought to have one."

"But surely Mrs. Middlemist's conduct is irreproachable," said Sypher.

"Irreproachable? Do you think trapesing about alone all over the earth—mixing with all sorts of people she doesn't know from Adam, and going goodness knows where and doing goodness knows what, and idling her life away, never putting a darn in her stockings even—is irreproachable conduct on the part of a young woman of Zora's birth and appearance? The way she dresses must attract attention, wherever she goes. It's supposed to be 'stylish' nowadays. In my time it was immodest. When a young woman was forced to journey alone she made herself as inconspicuous as possible. Zora ought to have a husband to look after her. Then she could do as she liked—or as he liked, which would be much the best thing for her."

"I happen to be in Mrs. Middlemist's confidence," said Sypher. "She has told me many times that she would never marry again. Her marriage—"

"Stuff and rubbish!" cried Cousin Jane. "You wait until the man comes along who has made up his mind to marry her. It must be a big strong man who won't stand any nonsense and will take her by the shoulders and shake her. She'll marry him fast enough. We'll see what happens to her in California."

"I hope she won't marry one of those dreadful creatures with lassos," said Mrs. Oldrieve, whose hazy ideas of California were based on hazier memories of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show which she had seen many years ago in London.

"I hope Mrs. Middlemist won't marry at all," said Sypher, in a tone of alarm.

"Why?" asked Cousin Jane.

She shot the question at him with almost a snarl. Sypher paused for a moment or two before replying.

"I should lose a friend," said he.

"Humph!" said Cousin Jane.

If the late Rev. Laurence Sterne had known Cousin Jane, "Tristram Shandy" would have been the richer by a chapter on "Humphs." He would have analyzed this particular one with a minute delicacy beyond the powers of Clem Sypher through whose head rang the echo of the irritating vocable for some time afterwards. It meant something. It meant something uncomfortable. It was directly leveled at himself and yet it seemed to sum up her previous disparaging remarks about Zora. "What the dickens did she mean by it?" he asked himself.

He came down to Nunsmere every week now, having given up his establishment at Kilburn Priory and sold the house—"The Kurhaus," as he had named it in his pride. A set of bachelor's chambers in St. James's sheltered him during his working days in London. He had also sold his motor-car; for retrenchment in personal expenses had become necessary, and the purchase-money of house and car were needed for the war of advertising which he was waging against his rivals. These were days black with anxiety and haunting doubt, illuminated now and then by Zora, who wrote gracious letters of encouragement. He carried them about with him like talismans.

Sometimes he could not realize that the great business he had created could be on the brink of failure. The routine went on as usual. At the works at Bermondsey the same activity apparently prevailed as when the Cure had reached the hey-day of its fortune some five years before. In the sweet-smelling laboratory gleaming with white tiles and copper retorts, the white-aproned workmen sorted and weighed and treated according to the secret recipe the bundles of herbs that came in every day and were stacked in pigeon-holes along the walls. In the boiling-sheds, not so sweet-smelling, the great vats of fat bubbled and ran, giving out to the cooling-troughs the refined white cream of which the precious ointment was made. Beyond there was another laboratory vast and clean and busy, where the healing ichor of the herbs was mixed with the drugs and the cream. Then came the work-rooms where rows of girls filled the celluloid boxes, one dabbing in the well-judged quantity, another cutting it off clean to the level of the top with a swift stroke of the spatula, another fitting on the lid, and so on, in endless but fascinating monotony until the last girl placed on the trolley by her side, waiting to carry it to the packing-shed, the finished packet of Sypher's Cure as it would be delivered to the world. Then there were the packing-sheds full of deal cases for despatching the Cure to the four quarters of the globe, some empty, some being filled, others stacked in readiness for the carriers: a Babel of sounds, of hammering clamps, of creaking barrows, of horses by the open doors rattling their heavy harness and trampling the flagstones with their heavy hoofs; a ceaseless rushing of brawny men in sackcloth aprons, of dusty men with stumps of pencils and note-books and crumpled invoices, counting and checking and reporting to other men in narrow glass offices against the wall. Outside stood the great wagons laden with the white deal boxes bound with iron hoops and bearing in vermilion letters the inscription of Sypher's Cure.

Every detail of this complicated hive was as familiar to him as his kitchen was to his cook. He had planned it all, organized it all. Every action of every human creature in the place from the skilled pharmaceutist responsible for the preparation of the ointment to the grimy boy who did odd jobs about the sheds had been pre-conceived by him, had had its mainspring in his brain. Apart from idealistic aspirations concerned with the Cure itself, the perfecting of this machinery of human activity had been a matter of absorbing interest, its perfection a subject of honorable pride.

He walked through the works day after day, noting the familiar sights and sounds, pausing here and there lovingly, as a man does in his garden to touch some cherished plant or to fill himself with the beauty of some rare flower. The place was inexpressibly dear to him. That those furnaces should ever grow cold, that those vats should ever be empty, that those two magic words should cease to blaze on the wooden boxes, should fade from the sight of man, that those gates should ever be shut, seemed to transcend imagination. The factory had taken its rank with eternal, unchanging things, like the solar system and the Bank of England. Yet he knew only too well that there had been change in the unchanging and in his soul dwelt a sickening certainty that the eternal would be the transient. Gradually the staff had been reduced, the output lessened. Already two of the long tables once filled with girls stood forlornly empty.

His comfortably appointed office in Moorgate Street told the same story. Week after week the orders slackened and gradually the number of the clerks had shrunk. Gloom settled permanently on the manager's brow. He almost walked on tiptoe into Sypher's room and spoke to him in a hushed whisper, until rebuked for dismalness.

"If you look like that, Shuttleworth, I shall cry."

On another occasion Shuttleworth said:

"We are throwing money away on advertisements. The concern can't stand it."

Sypher turned, blue pencil in hand, from the wall where draft proofs of advertisements were pinned for his correction and master's touch. This was a part of the business that he loved. It appealed to the flamboyant in his nature. It particularly pleased him to see omnibuses pass by bearing the famous "Sypher's Cure," an enlargement of his own handwriting, in streaming letters of blood.

"We're going to double them," said he; and his air was that of the racing Mississippi captains of old days who in response to the expostulation of their engineers sent a little nigger boy to sit on the safety-valve.

The dismal manager turned up his eyes to heaven with the air of the family steward in Hogarth's "Mariage a la Mode." He had not his chief's Napoleonic mind; but he had a wife and a large family. Clem Sypher also thought of that—not only of Shuttleworth's wife and family, but also of the wives and families of the many men in his employ. It kept him awake at nights.

In the soothing air of Nunsmere, however, he slept, in long dead stretches, as a tired man sleeps, in spite of trains which screeched past the bottom of his lawn. Their furious unrest enhanced the peace of village things. He began to love the little backwater of the earth whose stillness calmed the fever of life. As soon as he stepped out on to the platform at Ripstead a cool hand seemed to touch his forehead, and charm away the cares that made his temples throb. At Nunsmere he gave himself up to the simplicities of the place. He took to strolling, like Septimus, about the common and made friends with the lame donkey. On Sunday mornings he went to church. He had first found himself there out of curiosity, for, though not an irreligious man, he was not given to pious practices; but afterwards he had gone on account of the restfulness of the rural service. His mind essentially reverend took it very seriously, just as it took seriously the works of a great poet which he could not understand or any alien form of human aspiration; even the parish notices and the publication of banns he received with earnest attention. His intensity of interest as he listened to the sermon sometimes flattered the mild vicar, and at other times—when thinness of argument pricked his conscience—alarmed him considerably. But Sypher would not have dared enter into theological disputation. He took the sermon as he took the hymns, in which he joined lustily. Cousin Jane, whom he invariably met with Mrs. Oldrieve after the service and escorted home, had no such scruples. She tore the vicar's theology into fragments and scattered them behind her as she walked, like a hare in a paper chase.

Said the Literary Man from London, who had strolled with them on one of these occasions:

"The good lady's one of those women who speak as if they had a relation who had married a high official in the Kingdom of Heaven and now and then gave them confidential information."

Sypher liked Rattenden because he could often put into a phrase his own unformulated ideas. He also belonged to a world to which he himself was a stranger, the world of books and plays and personalities and theories of art. Sypher thought that its denizens lived on a lofty plane.

"The atmosphere," said Rattenden, "is so rarified that the kettle refuses to boil properly. That is why we always have cold tea at literary gatherings. My dear fellow, it's a damned world. It talks all day and does nothing all night. The ragged Italian in front of the fresco in his village church or at the back of the gallery at the opera of his town knows more essentials of painting and music than any of us. It's a hollow sham of a world filled with empty words. I love it."

"Then why abuse it?" laughed Sypher.

"Because it's a wanton and the wanton angers you and fascinates you at the same time. You never know how to take her. You are aware she hasn't got a heart, but her lips are red. She is unreal. She holds views in defiance of common sense. Which is the nobler thing to do—to dig potatoes or paint a man digging potatoes? She swears to you that the digger is a clod of earth and the painter a handful of heaven. She is talking rot. You know it. Yet you believe her."

Sypher was not convinced by the airy paradoxician. He had a childish idea that painters and novelists and actors were superior beings. Rattenden found this Arcadian and cultivated Sypher's society. They took long walks together on Sunday afternoons.

"After all," said Rattenden, "I can speak freely. I am a pariah among my kind."

Sypher asked why.

"Because I don't play golf. In London it is impossible to be seriously regarded as a literary man unless you play golf."

He found Sypher a good listener. He loved to catch a theory of life, hold it in his hand like a struggling bird while he discoursed about it, and let it go free into the sunshine again. Sypher admired his nimbleness of mind.

"You juggle with ideas as the fellows on the stage do with gilt balls."

"It's a game I learned," said Rattenden. "It's very useful. It takes one's mind off the dull question of earning bread and butter for a wife and five children."

"I wish you'd teach it to me," said Sypher. "I've many wives and many children dependent on me for bread and butter!"

Rattenden was quick to note the tone of depression. He laughed kindly.

"Looking on is just as good. When you're worried in London why don't you look me up? My wife and I will play the game for you. She's an amusing body. Heaven knows how I should have got through without her. She also swears by Sypher's Cure."

So they became friends. Sypher, since the blistered heel episode, had lost his fearless way of trumpeting the Cure far and wide, having a nervous dread of seeing the p and q of the hateful words form themselves on the lips of a companion. He became subdued, and spoke only of travel and men and things, of anything but the Cure. He preferred to listen and, as Rattenden preferred to talk, he found conversation a simple matter. Rattenden was an amusing anecdotist and had amassed a prodigious amount of raw material for his craft. To the collector, by some unknown law of attraction, come the objects which he collects. Everywhere he goes he finds them to his hand, as Septimus's friend found the Toby jugs. Wherever Rattenden turned, a bit of gossip met his ear. Very few things, therefore, happened in literary and theatrical London which did not come inevitably to his knowledge. He could have wrecked many homes and pricked many reputations. As a man of the world, however, he used his knowledge with discretion, and as an artist in anecdote he selected fastidiously. He seldom retailed a bit of gossip for its own sake; when he did so he had a purpose.

One evening they dined together at Sypher's club, a great semi-political institution with many thousand members. He had secured, however, a quiet table in a corner of the dining-room which was adorned with full-length portraits of self-conscious statesmen. Sypher unfolded his napkin with an air of satisfaction.

"I've had good news to-day. Mrs. Middlemist is on her way home."

"You have the privilege of her friendship," said Rattenden. "You're to be envied. O fortunate nimium."

He preserved some of the Oxford tradition in tone and manner. He had brown hair turning gray, a drooping mustache and wore pince-nez secured by a broad black cord. Being very short-sighted his eyes seen through the thick lenses were almost expressionless.

"Zora Middlemist," said he, squeezing lemon over his oysters, "is a grand and splendid creature whom I admire vastly. As I never lose an opportunity of telling her that she is doing nothing with her grand and splendid qualities, I suffer under the ban of her displeasure."

"What do you think she ought to do with them?" asked Sypher.

"It's a difficult and delicate matter to discuss a woman with another man; especially—" he waved a significant hand. "But I, in my little way, have written a novel or two—studies of women. I speak therefore as an expert. Now, just as a painter can't correctly draw the draped figure unless he has an anatomical knowledge of the limbs beneath, so is a novelist unable to present the character of a woman with sincerity and verisimilitude unless he has taken into account all the hidden physiological workings of that woman's nature. He must be familiar with the workings of the sex principle within her, although he need not show them in his work, any more than the painter shows the anatomy. Analyzing thus the imaginary woman, one forms a habit of analyzing the real woman in whom one takes an interest—or rather one does it unconsciously." He paused. "I told you it was rather delicate. You see what I'm trying to get at? Zora Middlemist is driven round the earth like Io by the gadfly of her temperament. She's seeking the Beauty or Meaning or Fulfilment, or whatever she chooses to call it, of Life. What she's really looking for is Love."

"I don't believe it," said Sypher.

Rattenden shrugged his shoulders. "It's true all the same. But in her case it's the great love—the big thing for the big man—the gorgeous tropical sunshine in which all the splendor of her can develop. No little man will move her. She draws them all round her—that type has an irresistible atmosphere—but she passes them by with her magnificent head in the air. She is looking all the time for the big man. The pathetic comedy of it is that she is as innocent and as unconscious of the object of her search as the flower that opens its heart to the bee bearing the pollen on its wings. I'm not infallible as a general rule. In this case I am."

He hastened to consume his soup which had got cold during his harangue.

"You've mixed much with women and studied them," said Sypher. "I haven't. I was engaged to a girl once, but it was a tepid affair. She broke it off because it was much more vital to me to work in my laboratory than to hold her hand in her mother's parlor. No doubt she was right. This was in the early days when I was experimenting with the Cure. Since then I've been a man of one idea. It has absorbed all my soul and energies, so that I've had none to spare for women. Here and there, of course—"

"I know. The trifling things. They are part of the banquet of life. One eats and forgets."

Sypher glanced at him and nodded his appreciation of the Literary Man's neat way of putting things. But he did not reply. He ate his fish in silence, hardly tasting it, his mind far away following Zora Middlemist across the seas. A horrible, jealous hatred of the big man for whom she sought sprang up in his heart. His pink face flushed red.

"This sole bonne femme is excellent," said Rattenden.

Sypher started in confusion, and praised the chef, and talked gastronomy while his thoughts were with Zora. He remembered the confession of Septimus Dix in Paris. Septimus had been caught in the irresistible atmosphere. He loved her, but he was one of the little men and she had passed him by with her magnificent head in the air. The gastronomic talk languished. Presently Rattenden said:

"One of the feminine phenomena that has puzzled me most of late has been the marriage of her sister to Septimus Dix."

Sypher laid down his knife and fork.

"How extraordinary that you should mention it! He was in my mind as you spoke."

"I was thinking of the sister," said Rattenden. "She has Mrs. Middlemist's temperament without her force of character—the sex without the splendor. I heard a very curious thing about her only yesterday."

"What was it?"

"It was one of those things that are not told."

"Tell me," said Sypher, earnestly. "I have reasons for asking. I am convinced there are circumstances of which neither Mrs. Dix's mother nor sister know anything. I'm a loyal man. You may trust me."

"Very well," said Rattenden. "Have you ever heard of a man called Mordaunt Prince? Yes—a well-known actor—about the biggest blackguard that disgraces the stage. He was leading man at the theater where she last played. They were doing 'The Widow of Ware.' They were about a great deal together. It was common gossip at the time."

"Gossip is notoriously uncharitable," said Sypher.

"If charity covers a multitude of sins, uncharitableness has the advantage of uncovering them. The pudor britannicus, however, is responsible for uncovering the one I am going to tell you of. About two or three months before the marriage, Emmy Oldrieve and Mordaunt Prince were staying together at an hotel in Tunbridge Wells. There was no mistake about it. There they were. They had a motor with them. A week before the Dix marriage was announced Mordaunt Prince married a Mrs. Morris—old Sol Morris, the money-lender's widow."

Sypher stared at him.

"It's one of the least amazing of human phenomena," said Rattenden, cynically. "I'm only puzzled at Calypso being so soon able to console herself for the departure of Ulysses, and taking up with such a dreamy-headed shadow of a man as our friend Dix. The end of the Mordaunt Prince story is that he soon grew too much for the widow, who has pensioned him off, and now he is drinking himself to death in Naples."

"Emmy Oldrieve! Good God, is it possible?" cried Sypher, absently pushing aside the dish the waiter handed him.

Rattenden carefully helped himself to partridge and orange salad.

"It's not only possible, but unquestionable fact. You see," he added complacently, "nothing can happen without its coming sooner or later to me. My informant was staying at the hotel all the time. You will allow me to vouch absolutely for her veracity."

Sypher did not speak for some moments. The large dining-room with its portraits of self-conscious statesmen faded away and became a little street in Paris, one side in shade and the other baking in the sun; and at a little iron table sat a brown and indiscreet Zouave and Septimus Dix, pale, indecisive, with a wistful appeal in his washed-out blue eyes. Suddenly he regained consciousness, and, more for the sake of covering his loss of self-possession than for that of eating, he recalled the waiter and put some partridge on his plate. Then he looked across the table at his guest and said very sternly:

"I look to you to prevent this story going any further."

"I've already made it my duty to do so," said Rattenden.

Sypher helped his guest to wine.

"I hope you like this Roederer," said he. "It's the only exquisite wine in the club, and unfortunately there are not more than a few bottles left. I had seven dozen of the same cuvee in my cellar at Priory Park—if anything, in better condition. I had to sell it with the rest of the things when I gave up the house. It went to my heart. Champagne is the only wine I understand. There was a time when it stood as a symbol to me of the unattainable. Now that I can drink it when I will, I know that all the laws of philosophy forbid its having any attraction for me. Thank heaven I'm not dyspeptic enough in soul to be a philosopher and I'm grateful for my aspirations. I cultivated my taste for champagne out of sheer gratitude."

"Any wise man," said Rattenden, "can realize his dreams. It takes something much higher than wisdom to enjoy the realization."

"What is that?"

"The heart of a child," said Rattenden. He smiled in his inscrutable way behind his thick lenses, and sipped his champagne. "Truly a delicious wine," said he.

Sypher said good-by to his guest on the steps of the club, and walked home to his new chambers in St. James's deep in thought. For the first time since his acquaintance with Rattenden, he was glad to part from him. He had a great need of solitude. It came to him almost as a shock to realize that things were happening in the world round about him quite as heroic, in the eyes of the High Gods, as the battle between Sypher's Cure and Jebusa Jones's Cuticle Remedy. The curtain of life had been lifted, and a flash of its inner mysteries had been revealed. His eyes still were dazed. But he had received the gift of vision. He had seen beyond doubt or question the heart of Septimus Dix. He knew what he had done, why he had done it.

Zora Middlemist had passed Septimus by with her magnificent head in the air. But he was not one of the little men.

"By God, he is not!" he cried aloud, and the cry came from his depths.

Zora Middlemist had passed him, Clem Sypher, by with her magnificent head in the air.

He let himself into his chambers; they struck him as being chill and lonely, the casual, uncared-for hiding-place of one of the little men. He stirred the fire, almost afraid to disturb the cold silence by the rattle of the poker against the bars of the grate. His slippers were set in readiness on the hearth-rug, and the machine who valeted him had fitted them with boot-trees. He put them on, and unlocking his desk, took out the letter which he had received that morning from Zora.

"For you," she wrote, "I want victory all along the line—the apotheosis of Sypher's Cure on Earth. For myself, I don't know what I want. I wish you would tell me."

Clem Sypher sat in an arm-chair and looked into the fire until it went out. For the first time in his life he did not know what he wanted.



CHAPTER XVII

The days that followed were darkened by overwhelming anxieties, so that he speculated little as to the Ultimately Desired. A chartered accountant sat in the office at Moorgate Street and shed around him the gloom of statistics. Unless a miracle happened the Cure was doomed.

It is all very well to seat a little nigger on the safety-valve if the end of the journey is in sight. The boiler may just last out the strain. But to suppose that he will sit there in permanent security to himself and the ship for an indefinite time is an optimism unwarranted by the general experience of this low world. Sypher's Cure could not stand the strain of the increased advertisement. Shuttleworth found a dismal pleasure in the fulfilment of his prophecy. A reduction in price had not materially affected the sales. The Jebusa Jones people had lowered the price of the Cuticle Remedy and still undersold the Cure. During the year the Bermondsey works had been heavily mortgaged. The money had all been wasted on a public that had eyes and saw not, that had ears and heard not the simple gospel of the Friend of Humanity—"Try Sypher's Cure." In the midst of the gloom Shuttleworth took the opportunity of deprecating the unnecessary expense of production, never having so greatly dared before. Only the best and purest materials had been possible for the divine ointment. By using second qualities, a great saving could be effected without impairing the efficacy of the Cure. Thus Shuttleworth. Sypher blazed into holy anger, as if he had been counseled to commit sacrilege.

Radical reforms were imperative, if the Cure was to be saved. He spent his nights over vast schemes only to find the fatal flaw in the cold light of the morning. This angered him. It seemed that the sureness of his vision had gone. Something strange, uncanny had happened within him, he knew not what. It had nothing to do with his intellectual force, his personal energy. It had nothing to do with his determination to win through and restore the Cure to its former position in the market. It was something subtle, spiritual.

The memory of the blistered heel lived with him. The slight doubt cast by Septimus on Zora's faith remained disturbingly at the back of his mind. Yet he clung passionately to his belief. If it were not Heaven-sent, then was he of men most miserable.

Never had he welcomed the sight of Nunsmere more than the next Saturday afternoon when the trap turned off the highroad and the common came into view. The pearls and faint blues of the sky, the tender mist softening the russet of the autumn trees, the gray tower of the little church, the red roofs of the cottages dreaming in their old-world gardens, the quiet green of the common with the children far off at play and the lame donkey watching them in philosophic content—all came like the gift of a very calm and restful God to the tired man's eyes.

He thought to himself: "It only lacks one figure walking across the common to meet me." Then the thought again: "If she were there would I see anything else?"

At Penton Court the maid met him at the door.

"Mr. Dix is waiting to see you, sir."

"Mr. Dix! Where is he?"

"In the drawing-room. He has been waiting a couple of hours."

He threw off his hat and coat, delighted, and rushed in to welcome the unexpected guest. He found Septimus sitting in the twilight by the French window that opened on the lawn, and making elaborate calculations in a note-book.

"My dear Dix!" He shook him warmly by the hand and clapped him on the shoulder. "This is more than a pleasure. What have you been doing with yourself?"

Septimus said, holding up the note-book:

"I was just trying to work out the problem whether a boy's expenses from the time he begins feeding-bottles to the time he leaves the University increases by arithmetical or geometrical progression."

Sypher laughed. "It depends, doesn't it, on his taste for luxuries?"

"This one is going to be extravagant, I'm afraid," said Septimus. "He cuts his teeth on a fifteenth-century Italian ivory carving of St. John the Baptist—I went into a shop to buy a purse and they gave it to me instead—and turns up his nose at coral and bells. There isn't much of it to turn up. I've never seen a child with so little nose. I invented a machine for elongating it, but his mother won't let me use it."

Sypher expressed his sympathy with Mrs. Dix, and inquired after her health. Septimus reported favorably. She had passed a few weeks at Hottetot-sur-Mer, which had done her good. She was now in Paris under the mothering care of Madame Bolivard, where she would stay until she cared to take up her residence in her flat in Chelsea, which was now free from tenants.

"And you?" asked Sypher.

"I've just left the Hotel Godet and come back to Nunsmere. Perhaps I'll give up the house and take Wiggleswick to London when Emmy returns. She promised to look for a flat for me. I believe women are rather good at finding flats."