“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