He turned and poked the fire, smashing a great lump of coal with a stroke of his muscular arm as if it had been the skull of the Jebusa Jones dragon.  Septimus twirled his small mustache and his hand inevitably went to his hair.  He had the scared look he always wore at moments when he was coming to a decision.

“But you would like to see Zora, wouldn’t you?” he asked.

Sypher wheeled round, and the expression on his face was that of a prisoner in the Bastille who had been asked whether he would like a summer banquet beneath the trees of Fontainebleau.

“You know that very well,” said he.

He laid down the poker and crossed the room to a chair.

“I’ve often thought of what you said in Paris about her going away.  You were quite right.  You have a genius for saying and doing the simple right thing.  We almost began our friendship by your saying it.  Do you remember?  It was in Monte Carlo.  You remember that you didn’t like my looking on Mrs. Middlemist as an advertisement.  Oh, you needn’t look uncomfortable, my dear fellow.  I loved you for it.  In Paris you practically told me that I oughtn’t to regard her as a kind of fetich for the Cure, and claim her bodily presence.  You also put before me the fact that there was no more reason for her to believe in the Cure than yourself or Hegisippe Cruchot.  If you could tell me anything more,” said he earnestly, “I should value it.”

What he expected to learn from Septimus he did not know.  But once having exalted him to inaccessible heights, the indomitable idealist was convinced that from his lips would fall words of gentle Olympian wisdom.  Septimus, blushing at his temerity in having pointed out the way to the man whom he regarded as the incarnation of force and energy, curled himself up awkwardly in his chair, clasping his ankles between his locked fingers.  At last the oracle spoke.

“If I were you,” he said, “before going mad or breaking my heart, I should wait until I saw Zora.”

“Very well.  It will be a long time.  Perhaps so much the better.  I shall remain sane and heart-whole all the longer.”

* * * * *

After dinner Sypher went round to “The Nook,” and executed his difficult mission as best he could.  To carry out Septimus’s wishes, which involved the vilification of the innocent and the beatification of the guilty, went against his conscience.  He omitted, therefore, reference to the demoniac rages which turned the home into an inferno, and to the quarrels over the machine for elongating the baby’s nose.  Their tempers were incompatible; they found a common life impossible; so, according to the wise modern view of things, they had decided to live apart while maintaining cordial relations.

Mrs. Oldrieve was greatly distressed.  Tears rolled down her cheeks on to her knitting.  The old order was changing too rapidly for her and the new to which it was giving place seemed anarchy to her bewildered eyes.  She held up tremulous hands in protest.  Husband and wife living apart so cheerfully, for such trivial reasons!  Even if one had suffered great wrong at the hands of the other it was their duty to remain side by side.  “Those whom God had joined together—­”