Zora listened to Clem Sypher’s dithyrambics.  The wine of the air had got into his head.  He spoke as she had heard no man speak before.  The turns of the road brought into sight view after magic view, causing her to catch her breath:  purple rock laughing in the sea, far-off townlets flashing white against the mountain flank, gardens of paradise.  Yet Clem Sypher sang of his cure.

First it was a salve for all external ills that flesh is heir to.  It spared humanity its heritage of epidermatous suffering.  It could not fail.  He reeled off the string of hideous diseases with a lyrical lilt.  It was his own discovery.  An obscure chemist’s assistant in Bury St. Edmunds, he had, by dint of experiments, hit on this world-upheaving remedy.

“When I found what it was that I had done, Mrs. Middlemist,” said he solemnly, “I passed my vigil, like a knight of old, in my dispensary, with a pot of the cure in front of me, and I took a great oath to devote my life to spread it far and wide among the nations of the earth.  It should bring comfort, I swore, to the king in his palace and the peasant in his hut.  It should be a household word in the London slum and on the Tartar steppe.  Sypher’s Cure could go with the Red Cross into battle, and should be in the clerk’s wife’s cupboard in Peckham Rye.  The human chamois that climbs the Alps, the gentle lunatic that plays golf, the idiot that goes and gets scalped by Red Indians, the missionary that gets half roasted by cannibals—­if he gets quite roasted the cure’s no good; it can’t do impossibilities—­all should carry Sypher’s Cure in their waistcoat pockets.  All mankind should know it, from China to Peru, from Cape Horn to Nova Zembla.  It would free the tortured world from plague.  I would be the Friend of Humanity.  I took that for my device.  It was something to live for.  I was twenty then.  I am forty now.  I have had twenty years of the fiercest battle that ever man fought.”

“And surely you’ve come off victorious, Mr. Sypher,” said Zora.

“I shall never be victorious until it has overspread the earth!” he declared.  And he passed one hand over the other in a gesture which symbolized the terrestrial globe with a coating of Sypher’s Cure.

“Why shouldn’t it?”

“It shall.  Somehow, I believe that with you on my side it will.”

“I?” Zora started away to the corner of the car, and gazed on him in blank amazement.  “I?  What in the world have I to do with it?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Sypher.  “I have an intuition.  I’m a believer in intuitions.  I’ve followed them all my life, and they’ve never played me false.  The moment I learned that you had never heard of me, I felt it.”

Zora breathed comfortably again.  It was not an implied declaration.

“I’m fighting against the Powers of Darkness,” he continued.  “I once read a bit of Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene.’  There was a Red Cross Knight who slew a Dragon—­but he had a fabulous kind of woman behind him.  When I saw you, you seemed that fabulous kind of woman.”