“I’ve left the hotel,” said Septimus.  “I’m going to catch the eleven train.  My luggage is on that cab.”

“But it’s five minutes past eleven now.  You have lost the train—­thank goodness.”

“I’ll be in good time for the four o’clock,” said Septimus.  “This is the way I generally travel.  I told you.”  He rose, swayed a bit, and put his hand on the table to steady himself.  “I’ll go and wait at the station.  Then I’ll be sure to catch it.  You see I must go.”

“But why?” cried Zora.

“Wiggleswick’s letter.  The house has been burnt down and everything in it.  The only thing he saved was a large portrait of Queen Victoria.”

Then he fainted.

* * * * *

Zora had him carried to a room in the hotel and sent for a doctor, who kept him in bed for a fortnight.  Zora and Turner nursed him, much to his apologetic content.  The Callenders in the meanwhile went to Berlin.

When Septimus got up, gaunt and staring, he appealed to the beholder as the most helpless thing which the Creator had clothed in the semblance of a man.

“He must take very great care of himself for the next few weeks,” said the doctor.  “If he gets a relapse I won’t answer for the consequences.  Can’t you take him somewhere?”

“Take him somewhere?” The idea had been worrying her for some days past.  If she left him to his own initiative he would probably go and camp with Wiggleswick amid the ruins of his house in Shepherd’s Bush, where he would fall ill again and die.  She would be responsible.

“We can’t leave him here, at any rate,” she remarked to Turner.

Turner agreed.  As well abandon a month-old baby on a doorstep and expect it to earn its livelihood.  She also had come to take a proprietary interest in Septimus.

“He might stay with us in Nunsmere.  What do you think, Turner?”

“I think, ma’am,” said Turner, “that would be the least improper arrangement.”

“He can have Cousin Jane’s room,” mused Zora, knowing that Cousin Jane would fly at her approach.

“And I’ll see, ma’am, that he comes down to his meals regular,” said Turner.

“Then it’s settled,” said Zora.

She went forthwith to the invalid and acquainted him with his immediate destiny.  At first he resisted.  He would be a nuisance.  Since his boyhood he had never lived in a lady’s house.  Even landladies in lodgings had found him impossible.  He could not think of accepting more favors from her all too gracious hands.

“You’ve got to do what you’re told,” said Zora, conclusively.  She noticed a shade of anxiety cross his face.  “Is there anything else?”

“Wiggleswick.  I don’t know what’s to become of him.”

“He can come to Nunsmere and lodge with the local policeman,” said Zora.

On the evening before they started from Paris she received a letter addressed in a curiously feminine hand.  It ran: