The great London firm to whom he had entrusted the furniture and decoration had done their splendid worst.  The drawing-room had the appearance of an hotel sitting-room trying to look coy.  An air of factitious geniality pervaded the dining-room.  An engraving of Frans Hals’s “Laughing Cavalier” hung with too great a semblance of jollity over the oak sideboard.  Everything was too new, too ordered, too unindividual; but Sypher loved it, especially the high-art wall-paper and restless frieze.  Zora, a woman of instinctive taste, who, if she bought a bedroom water-bottle, managed to identify it with her own personality, professed her admiration with a woman’s pitying mendacity, but resolved to change many things for the good of Clem Sypher’s soul.  Emmy, still pale and preoccupied, said little.  She was not in a mood to appreciate Clem Sypher, whose loud voice and Napoleonic manners jarred upon her nerves.  Septimus thought it all prodigiously fine, whereat Emmy waxed sarcastic.

“I wish I could do something for you,” he said, heedless of her taunts, during a moment when they were out of earshot of the others.  He had already offered to go to Naples and bring back Mordaunt Prince, and had received instant orders not to be a fool.  “I wish I could make you laugh again.”

“I don’t want to laugh,” she replied impatiently.  “I want to sit on the floor and howl.”

They happened to be in the hall.  At the farther end Septimus caught sight of a fluffy Persian kitten playing with a bit of paper, and guided by one of his queer intuitions he went and picked it up and laid its baby softness against the girl’s cheek.  Her mood changed magically.

“Oh, the darling!” she cried, and kissed its tiny, wet nose.

She was quite polite to Sypher during luncheon, and laughed when he told her that he called the kitten Jebusa Jones.  She asked why.

“Because,” said he, showing his hand covered with scratches, “she produces on the human epidermis the same effect as his poisonous cuticle remedy.”

Whereupon Emmy decided that the man who could let a kitten scratch his hand in that fashion had elements of good in his nature.

“Now for the surprise,” said Sypher, when Septimus and he joined the ladies after lunch.  “Come.”

They followed him outside, through the French windows of the drawing-room.  “Other people,” said he, “want houses with lawns reaching down to the side of the river or the Menai Straits or Windermere.  I’m the only person, I think, who has ever sought for a lawn running down to a main line of railway.”

“That’s why this house was untenanted so long,” said Zora.

A row of trees separated the small garden from the lawn in question.  When they passed through this screen, the lawn and the line of railway and the dreamy, undulating Surrey country came into view.  Also an enormous board.  Why hadn’t he taken it down, Zora asked.

“That’s the surprise!” exclaimed Sypher eagerly.  “Come round to the front.”