But Emmy heard him not.  The dismaying sense of utter loneliness smote her down.  It was the last straw.  Edith, on whom she had staked all her hopes of physical comfort, was not there.  Overstrained in body, nerves, and mind, she sank helplessly in the chair which Septimus set out for her before the fire, too exhausted to cry.  She began to speak in a queer, toneless voice: 

“I don’t know what to do.  Edith could have helped me.  I want to get away and hide.  I can’t stay here.  It’s the first place Zora will come to.  She mustn’t find me.  Edith has been through it herself.  She would have taken me somewhere abroad or in the country where I could have stayed in hiding till it was over.  It was all so sudden—­the news of his marriage.  I was half crazy, I couldn’t make plans.  I thought Edith would help me.  Now she has gone, goodness knows where.  My God, what shall I do?”

She went on, looking at him haggardly, a creature driven beyond the reticence of sex, telling her inmost secret to a man as if it were a commonplace of trouble.  It did not occur to her distraught mind that he was a man.  She spoke to herself, without thought, uttering the cry for help that had been pent within her all that awful night.

The puzzledom of Septimus grew unbearable in its intensity; then suddenly it burst like a skyrocket and a blinding rain of fire enveloped him.  He stood paralyzed with pain and horror.

The sullen morning light diffused itself through the room, mingling ironically with the pretty glow cast by the pink-shaded electric globes, while the two forlorn grotesques regarded each other, unconscious of each other’s grotesqueness, the girl disheveled and haggard, the man with rough gray coat unbuttoned, showing the rumpled evening dress; her toque miserably awry, his black tie riding above his collar, the bow somewhere behind his ear.  And the tragedy of tragedies of a young girl’s life was unfolded.

“My God, what am I to do?”

Septimus stared at her, his hands in his trousers pockets.  In one of them his fingers grasped a folded bit of paper.  He drew it out unthinkingly—­a very dirty bit of paper.  In his absent-minded way he threw it towards the fire, but it fell on the tiled hearth.  In moments of great strain the mind seizes with pitiful eagerness on the trivial.  Emmy looked at the paper.  Something familiar about its shape struck her.  She leaned forward, picked it up and unfolded it.

“This is a check,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone.  “Did you mean to throw it away?”

He took it from her and, looking at it, realized that It was Clem Sypher’s check for two hundred pounds.

“Thanks,” said he, thrusting it into his overcoat pocket.

Then his queerly working brain focused associations.

“I know what we can do,” said he.  “We can go to Naples.”

“What good would that be?” she asked, treating the preposterous question seriously.