of Zora Middlemist, he discouraged such dreams as making more for mild unhappiness than for joy, and bent his thoughts to his guns and railway carriages and other world-upheaving inventions.  The only thing that caused him any uneasiness was an overdraft at his bank due to cover which he had to pay on shares purchased for him by a circularizing bucket-shop keeper.  It had seemed so simple to write Messrs. Shark & Co., or whatever alias the philanthropic financier assumed, a check for a couple of hundred pounds, and receive Messrs. Shark’s check for two thousand in a fortnight, that he had wondered why other people did not follow this easy road to fortune.  Perhaps they did, he reflected:  that was how they managed to keep a large family of daughters and a motor car.  But when the shark conveyed to him in unintelligible terms the fact that unless he wrote a check for two or three hundred pounds more his original stake would be lost, and when these also fell through the bottomless bucket of Messrs. Shark & Co. and his bankers called his attention to an overdrawn account, it began to dawn upon him that these were not the methods whereby a large family of daughters and a motor car were unprecariously maintained.  The loss did not distress him to the point of sleeplessness; his ideas as to the value of money were as vague as his notions on the rearing of babies; but he was publishing his book at his own expense, and was concerned at not being in a position to pay the poor publisher immediately.

At Mrs. Oldrieve’s he found his previsions nearly all fulfilled.  Zora, with a sofa-ful of railway time-tables and ocean-steamer handbooks, sought his counsel as to a voyage round the world which she had in contemplation; Mrs. Oldrieve impressed on his memory a recipe for an omelette which he was to convey verbally to Wiggleswick, although he confessed that the only omelette that Wiggleswick had tried to make they had used for months afterwards as a kettle-holder; but Emmy did not prattle.  She sat in a corner, listlessly turning over the leaves of a novel and taking an extraordinary lack of interest in the general conversation.  The usual headache and neuralgia supplied her excuse.  She looked pale, ill, and worried; and worry on a baby face is a lugubrious and pitiful spectacle.

After Mrs. Oldrieve had retired for the night, and while Zora happened to be absent from the room in search of an atlas, Septimus and Emmy were left alone for a moment.

“I’m so sorry you have a headache,” said Septimus sympathetically.  “Why don’t you go to bed?”

“I hate bed.  I can’t sleep,” she replied, with an impatient shake of the body.  “You mustn’t mind me.  I’m sorry I’m so rotten—­ah! well then—­such an uninspiring companion, if you like,” she added, seeing that the word had jarred on him.  Then she rose.  “I suppose I bore you.  I had better go, as you suggest, and get out of the way.”

He intercepted her petulant march to the door.