“I can’t say I’ll do it with pleasure,” said Sypher, “for I’m more than sorry to hear your news.  I suspected as much when I met you in Paris.  But I’ll see Mrs. Oldrieve as soon as possible and explain.”

“Thank you,” said Septimus; “you don’t know what a service you would be rendering me.”

He uttered a sigh of relief and relit his cigar which had gone out during his appeal.  Then there was a silence.  Septimus looked dreamily out at the row of trees that marked the famous lawn reaching down to the railway line.  The mist had thickened with the fall of the day and hung heavy on the branches, and the sky was gray.  Sypher watched him, greatly moved; tempted to cry out that he knew all, that he was not taken in by the simple legend of his ungovernable temper and unlovely disposition.  His heart went out to him, as to a man who dwelt alone on lofty heights, inaccessible to common humanity.  He was filled with pity and reverence for him.  Perhaps he exaggerated.  But Sypher was an idealist.  Had he not set Sypher’s Cure as the sun in his heaven and Zora as one of the fixed stars?

It grew dark.  Sypher rang for the lamp and tea.

“Or would you like breakfast?” he asked laughingly.

“I’ve just had supper,” said Septimus.  “Wiggleswick found some cheese in a cupboard.  I buried it in the front garden.”  A vague smile passed on his face like a pale gleam of light over water on a cloudy day.  “Wiggleswick is deaf.  He couldn’t hear it.”

“He’s a lazy scoundrel,” said Sypher.  “I wonder you don’t sack him.”

Septimus licked a hanging strip of cigar-end into position—­he could never smoke a cigar properly—­and lit it for the third time.

“Wiggleswick is good for me,” said he.  “He keeps me human.  I am apt to become a machine.  I live so much among them.  I’ve been working hard on a new gun—­or rather an old gun.  It’s field artillery, quick-firing.  I got on to the idea again from a sighting apparatus I invented.  I have the specification in my pocket.  The model is at home.  I brought it from Paris.”

He fetched a parcel of manuscript from his pocket and unrolled it into flatness.

“I should like to show it to you.  Do you mind?”

“It would interest me enormously,” said Sypher.

“I invent all sorts of things.  I can’t help it.  But I always come back to guns—­I don’t know why.  I hope you’ve done nothing further with the guns of large caliber.  I’ve been thinking about them seriously, and I find they’re all moonshine.”

He smiled with wan cheerfulness at the waste of the labor of years.  Sypher, on whose conscience the guns had laid their two hundred ton weight, felt greatly relieved.  Their colossal scale had originally caught his imagination which loved big conceptions.  Their working had seemed plausible to his inexpert eye.  He had gone with confidence to his friend, the expert on naval gunnery, who had reported on them in breezy, sea-going terms of disrespect.  Since then he had shrunk from destroying his poor friend’s illusions.