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