He was taken aback by her directness, and passed his fingers through his hair.

“I don’t know,” said he.

“The first thing we must do,” said Emmy—­and her voice sounded in her own ears like someone else’s—­“is to get away from here.  Zora will be down by the first train after my absence is discovered.  You quite see that Zora mustn’t find me, don’t you?”

“Of course,” said Septimus, blankly.  Then he brightened.  “You can go to an hotel.  A Temperance Hotel in Bloomsbury.  Wiggleswick was telling me about one the other day.  A friend of his burgled it and got six years.  A man called Barkus.”

“But what was the name of the hotel?”

“Ah! that I forget,” said Septimus.  “It had something to do with Sir Walter Scott.  Let me see.  Lockhart—­no, Lockhart’s is a different place.  It was either the Bride of Lammermoor or—­yes,” he cried triumphantly, “it was the Ravenswood, in Southampton Row.”

Emmy rose.  The switch off onto the trivial piece of paper had braced her unstrung nerves for a final effort:  that, and the terror of meeting Zora.

“You’ll take me there.  I’ll just put some things together.”

He opened the door for her to pass out.  On the threshold she turned.

“I believe God sent you to Nunsmere Common last night.”

She left him, and he went back to the fire and filled and lit his pipe.  Her words touched him.  They also struck a chord of memory.  His ever-wandering mind went back to a scene in undergraduate days.  It was the Corn Exchange at Cambridge, where the most famous of all American evangelists was holding one of a series of revivalist meetings.  The great bare hall was packed with youths, who came, some to scoff and others to pray.  The coarse-figured, bald-headed, brown-bearded man in black on the platform, with his homely phrase and (to polite undergraduate ears) terrible Yankee twang, was talking vehemently of the trivial instruments the Almighty used to effect His purposes.  Moses’s rod, for instance.  “You can imagine Pharaoh,” said he—­and the echo of the great voice came to Septimus through the years—­“you can imagine Pharaoh walking down the street one day and seeing Moses with a great big stick in his hand.  ‘Hallo, Moses,’ says he, ’where are you going?’ ‘Where am I going?’ says Moses.  ’I guess I’m going to deliver the Children of Israel out of the House of Bondage and conduct them to a land flowing with milk and honey.’  ’And how are you going to do it, Moses?’ ‘With this rod, sir, with this rod!’”

Septimus remembered how this bit of unauthenticated history was greeted with derision by the general, and with a shocked sense of propriety by the cultivated—­and young men at the university can be very cultivated indeed on occasion.  But the truth the great preacher intended to convey had lingered at the back of his own mind and now came out into the light.  Perhaps Emmy had spoken more truly than she thought.  In