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.”

Sypher handed him a box of cigars.  He lit one and held it awkwardly with the tips of his long, nervous fingers.  He passed the fingers of his other hand, with the familiar gesture, up his hair.

“I thought I’d come and see you,” he said hesitatingly, “before going to ‘The Nook.’  There are explanations to be made.  My wife and I are good friends, but we can’t live together.  It’s all my fault.  I make the house intolerable.  I—­I have an ungovernable temper, you know, and I’m harsh and unloving and disagreeable.  And it’s bad for the child.  We quarrel dreadfully—­at least, she doesn’t.”

“What about?” Sypher asked gravely.

“All sorts of things.  You see, if I want breakfast an hour before dinner-time, it upsets the household.  Then there was the nose machine—­and other inventions for the baby, which perhaps might kill it.  You can explain all this and tell them that the marriage has been a dreadful mistake on poor Emmy’s side, and that we’ve decided to live apart.  You will do this for me, won’t you?”