Zora returned his gaze.  Here was no rhodomontading.  The man was grappling with realities.

“No,” she replied simply.

“Neither do I any longer,” said Sypher.  “There is no difference between it and any quack ointment you can buy at the first chemist’s shop.  That is why, even if I saw a chance of putting the concern on its legs again, I couldn’t use your money.  That is why I asked you, just now, what you have thought of me—­a madman or a quack?”

“Doesn’t the mere fact of my being here show you what I thought of you?”

“Forgive me,” he said.  “It’s wrong to ask you such questions.”

“It’s worse than wrong.  It’s unnecessary.”

He passed his hands over his eyes, and sat down.

“I’ve gone through a lot to-day.  I’m not quite myself, so you must forgive me if I say unnecessary things.  God sent you to me this morning.  Septimus was His messenger.  If you hadn’t appeared just now I think I should have gone into black madness.”

“Tell me all about it,” she said softly.  “All that you care to tell.  I am your nearest friend—­I think.”

“And dearest.”

“And you are mine.  You and Septimus.  I’ve seen hundreds of people since I’ve been away, and some seem to have cared for me—­but there’s no one really in my life but you two.”

Sypher thought:  “And we both love you with all there is in us, and you don’t know it.”  He also thought jealously:  “Who are the people that have cared for you?”

He said:  “No one?”

A smile parted her lips as she looked him frankly in the eyes and repeated the negative.  He breathed a sigh of relief, for he had remembered Rattenden’s prophecy of the big man whom she was seeking, of the love for the big man, the gorgeous tropical sunshine in which all the splendor in her could develop.  She had not found him.  From the depths of his man’s egotism he uttered a prayer of thanksgiving.

“Tell me,” she said again.

“Do you remember my letter from Paris in the summer?”

“Yes.  You had a great scheme for the armies of the world.”

“That was the beginning,” said he, and then he told her all the grotesque story to the end, from the episode of the blistered heel.  He told her things that he had never told himself; things that startled him when he found them expressed in words.

“In Russia,” said he, “every house has its sacred pictures, even the poorest peasant’s hut.  They call them ikons.  These,” waving to the walls, “were my ikons.  What do you think of them?”

For the first time Zora became aware of the furniture and decoration of the room.  The cartoon, the advertisement proofs, the model of Edinburgh Castle, produced on her the same effect as the famous board in the garden at Fenton Court.  Then, however, she could argue with him on the question of taste, and lay down laws as the arbiter of the elegancies of conduct.  Now he viewed the sorry images with