Framed in oak on his walls hung kindly notes relating to the Cure from great personages or their secretaries.  At the bottom of one ran the sprawling signature of the Grand Duke who had hailed him as “ce bon Sypher” at the Gare de Lyon when he started on the disastrous adventure of the blistered heel.  There was the neatly docketed set of pigeonholes containing the proofs of all the advertisements he had issued.  Lying before him on his desk was a copy, resplendently bound in morocco for his own gratification, of the forty-page, thin-paper pamphlet which was wrapped, a miracle of fine folding, about each packet of the Cure.  On each page the directions for use were given in a separate language.  French, Fijian, Syrian, Basque were there—­forty languages—­so that all the sons of men could read the good tidings and amuse themselves at the same time by trying to decipher the message in alien tongues.

Wherever he looked, some mockery of vain triumph met his eye:  an enlargement of a snapshot photograph of the arrival of the first case of the Cure on the shores of Lake Tchad; photographs of the busy factory, now worked by a dwindling staff; proofs of full-page advertisements in which “Sypher’s Cure” and “Friend of Humanity” figured in large capitals; the model of Edinburgh Castle, built by a grateful inmate of a lunatic asylum out of the red celluloid boxes of the Cure.

He shuddered at all these symbols and images of false gods, and bowed his head again on his arms.  The abyss swallowed him.  The waters closed over his head.

How long he remained like this he did not know.  He had forbidden his door.  The busy life of the office stood still.  The dull roar of Moorgate Street was faintly heard, and now and then the windows vibrated faintly.  The sprawling, gilt, mid-Victorian clock on the mantelpiece had stopped.

Presently an unusual rustle in the room caused him to raise his head with a start.  Zora Middlemist stood before him.  He sprang to his feet.

“You?  You?”

“They wouldn’t let me in.  I forced my way.  I said I must see you.”

He stared at her, open-mouthed.  A shivering thrill passed through him, such as shakes a man on the verge of a great discovery.

“You, Zora?  You have come to me at this moment?”

He looked so strange and staring, so haggard and disheveled, that she moved quickly to him and laid both her hands on his.

“My dear friend, my dearest friend, is it as bad as that?”

A throb of pain underlay the commonplace words.  The anguish on his face stirred the best and most womanly in her.  She yearned to comfort him.  But he drew a pace or two away, and held up both hands as if warding her off, and stared at her still, but with a new light in his clear eyes that drank in her beauty and the sorcery of her presence.

“My God!” he cried, in a strained voice.  “My God!  What a fool I’ve been!”