“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