He led the way, striding some yards ahead.  Presently he turned and struck a dramatic attitude, as a man might do who had built himself a new wonder house.  And then on three astonished pairs of eyes burst the following inscription in gigantic capitals which he who flew by in an express train could read: 

    SYPHER’S CURE! 
    Clem Sypher.  Friend of Humanity! 
    I LIVE HERE!

“Isn’t that great?” he cried.  “I’ve had it in my mind for years.  It’s the personal note that’s so valuable.  This brings the whole passing world into personal contact with me.  It shows that Sypher’s Cure isn’t a quack thing run by a commercial company, but the possession of a man who has a house, who lives in the very house you can see through the trees.  ’What kind of a man is he?’ they ask.  ’He must be a nice man to live in such a nice house.  I almost feel I know him. I’ll try his Cure.’  Don’t you think it’s a colossal idea?”

He looked questioningly into three embarrassed faces.  Emmy, in spite of her own preoccupation, suppressed a giggle.  There was a moment’s silence, which was broken by Septimus’s mild voice: 

“I think, by means of levers running down to the line and worked by the trains as they passed, I could invent a machine for throwing little boxes of samples from the board into the railway carriage windows.”

Emmy burst out laughing.  “Come and show me how you would do it.”

She linked her arm in his and dragged him down to the line, where she spoke with mirthful disrespect of Sypher’s Cure.  Meanwhile Zora said nothing to Sypher.

“Don’t you like it?” he asked at last, disconcerted.

“Do you want me to be the polite lady you’ve asked to lunch or your friend?”

“My friend and my helper,” said he.

“Then,” she replied, touching his coat sleeve, “I must say that I don’t like it.  I hate it.  I think it’s everything that is most abominable.”

The board was one pride of his heart, and Zora was another.  He looked at them both alternately in a piteous, crestfallen way.

“But why?” he asked.

Zora’s eyes filled with tears.  She saw that her lack of appreciation had hurt him to the heart.  She was a generous woman, and did not convict him, as she would have done another man, of blatant vulgarity.  Yet she felt preposterously pained.  Why could not this great, single-minded creature, with ideas as high as they were queer, perceive the board’s rank abomination?

“It’s unworthy of you,” she said bravely.  “I want everyone to respect you as I do.  You see the Cure isn’t everything.  There’s a man behind it.”

“That’s the object of the board,” said Sypher.  “To show the man.”

“But it doesn’t show the chivalrous gentleman that I think you are,” she replied quickly.  “It gives the impression of some one quite different—­a horrid creature who would sell his self-respect for money.  Oh, don’t you understand?  It’s as bad as walking through the streets with ‘Sypher’s Cure’ painted on your hat.”