“I never realized how full empty pockets could be,” he declared.

They were walking across the common, Sypher having lunched at “The Nook.”  Presently they came across Septimus sitting by the pond.  He rose and greeted them.  He wore an overcoat buttoned up to the throat and a cloth cap.  Zora’s quick eyes noted an absence of detail in his attire.

“Why, you’re not dressed!  Oh, you do want a wife to look after you.”

“I’ve only just got up,” he explained, “and Wiggleswick wanted to do out my bedroom, so I hadn’t time to find my studs.  I was thinking all night, you see, and one can’t think and sleep at the same time.”

“A new invention?” laughed Zora.

“No.  The old ones.  I was trying to count them up.  I’ve taken out about fifty patents, and there are heaps of things half worked out which might be valuable.  Now I was thinking that if I made them all over to Sypher he might get in some practical fellow to set them right, and start companies and things to work them, and so make a lot of money.”

He took off his cap and ran his hand up his hair.  “There’s also the new gun.  I do wish you’d have that, too,” he added, anxiously.  “In fact, it was our talk yesterday that put the other idea into my head.”

Sypher clapped him on the shoulder and called him his dear, generous fellow.  But how could he accept?

“They’re not all rot,” said Septimus pleadingly.  “There’s a patent corkscrew which works beautifully.  Wiggleswick always uses it.”

Sypher laughed.  “Well, I’ll tell you what we can do.  We can get a syndicate together to run the Dix inventions, and pay you royalties on sales.”

“That seems a very good idea,” said Zora judicially.

But Septimus looked dissatisfied.  “I wanted to give them to Sypher,” said he.

Zora reminded him laughingly that he would have to provide for the future member of Parliament’s election expenses.  The royalties would come in handy.  She could not take Septimus’s inventions seriously.  But Sypher spoke of them later in his enthusiastic way.

“Who knows?  There may be things hidden among his models and specifications of enormous commercial value.  Lots of his inventions are crazy, but some are bound to be practical.  This field gun, for instance.  The genius who could have hit on that is capable of inventing anything.  Why shouldn’t I devote my life to spreading the Dix inventions over the earth?  It’s a colossal idea.  Not one invention, but fifty—­from a corkscrew to a machine gun.  It’s better than Sypher’s Cure, isn’t it?”

She glanced swiftly at him to see whether the last words were spoken in bitterness.  They were not.  His face beamed as it had beamed in the days when he had rhapsodied over the vision of an earth, one scab, to be healed by Sypher’s Cure.

“Say you think it’s better,” he urged.

“Yes.  It’s better,” she assented.  “But it’s chimerical.”