* * * * *

The day she had appointed as the end of her Monte Carlo visit arrived.  She would first go to Paris, where some Americans whom she had met in Florence and with whom she had exchanged occasional postcards pressed her to join them.  Then London; and then a spell of rest in the lavender of Nunsmere.  That was her programme.  Septimus Dix was to escort her as far as Paris, in defiance of the proprieties as interpreted by Turner.  What was to become of him afterwards neither conjectured; least of all Septimus himself.  He said nothing about getting back to Shepherd’s Bush.  Many brilliant ideas had occurred to him during his absence which needed careful working out.  Wherefore Zora concluded that he proposed to accompany her to London.

A couple of hours before the train started she dispatched Turner to Septimus’s hotel to remind him of the journey.  Turner, a strong-minded woman of forty—­like the oyster she had been crossed in love and like her mistress she held men in high contempt—­returned with an indignant tale.  After a series of parleyings with Mr. Dix through the medium of the hotel chasseur, who had a confused comprehension of voluble English, she had mounted at Mr. Dix’s entreaty to his room.  There she found him, half clad and in his dressing-gown, staring helplessly at a wilderness of clothing and toilet articles for which there was no space in his suit cases and bag, already piled mountain high.

“I can never do it, Turner,” he said as she entered.  “What’s to be done?”

Turner replied that she did not know; her mistress’s instructions were that he should catch the train.

“I’ll have to leave behind what I can’t get in,” he said despondently.  “I generally have to do so.  I tell the hotel people to give it to widows and orphans.  But that’s one of the things that make traveling so expensive.”

“But you brought everything, sir, in this luggage?”

“I suppose so.  Wiggleswick packed.  It’s his professional training, Turner.  I think they call it ‘stowing the swag.’”

As Turner had not heard of Wiggleswick’s profession, she did not catch the allusion.  Nor did Zora enlighten her when she reported the conversation.

“If they went in once they’ll go in again,” said Turner.

“They won’t.  They never do,” said Septimus.

His plight was so hopeless, he seemed so immeasurably her sex’s inferior, that he awoke her contemptuous pity.  Besides, her trained woman’s hands itched to restore order out of masculine chaos.

“Turn everything out and I’ll pack for you,” she said resolutely, regardless of the proprieties.  On further investigation she held out horrified hands.

He had mixed up shirts with shoes.  His clothes were rolled in bundles, his collars embraced his sponge, his trees, divorced from boots, lay on the top of an unprotected bottle of hair-wash; he had tried to fit his brushes against a box of tooth-powder and the top had already come off.  Turner shook out his dress suit and discovered a couple of hotel towels which had got mysteriously hidden in the folds.  She held them up severely.