“And I think you’re detestable!” cried Zora.  “There’s not a single man that can understand.”

“What do you want me to understand?”

“I don’t know,” said Zora, “but you ought to understand it.”

A day or two later, meeting Rattenden again, she found that he comprehended her too fully.

“What would have pleased you,” said he, “would have been to play the soeur noble, to have gathered the young couple in your embrace, and magnanimously given them to each other, and smiled on the happiness of which you had been the bounteous dispenser.  They’ve cheated you.  They’ve cut your part clean out of the comedy, and you don’t like it.  If I’m not right will you kindly order me out of the room?  Well?” he asked, after a pause, during which she hung her head.

“Oh, you can stay,” she said with a half-laugh.  “You’re the kind of man that always bets on a certainty.”

Rattenden was right.  She was jealous of Emmy for having unceremoniously stolen her slave from her service—­that Emmy had planned the whole conspiracy she had not the slightest doubt—­and she was angry with Septimus for having been weak enough to lend himself to such duplicity.  Even when he wrote her a dutiful letter from Paris—­to the telegram he had merely replied, “Sorry; impossible”—­full of everything save Emmy and their plans for the future, she did not forgive him.  How dared he consider himself fit to travel by himself?  His own servant qualified his doings as outlandish.

“They’ll make a terrible mess of their honeymoon,” she said to Clem Sypher.  “They’ll start for Rome and find themselves in St. Petersburg.”

“They’ll be just as happy,” said Sypher.  “If I was on my honeymoon, do you think I’d care where I went?”

“Well, I wash my hands of them,” said Zora with a sigh, as if bereft of dear responsibilities.  “No doubt they’re happy in their own way.”

And that, for a long time, was the end of the matter.  The house, cleaned and polished, glittered like the instrument room of a man-of-war, and no master or mistress came to bestow on Wiggleswick’s toil the meed of their approbation.  The old man settled down again to well-earned repose, and the house grew dusty and dingy again, and dustier and dingier as the weeks went on.

It has been before stated that things happen slowly in Nunsmere, even the reawakening of Zora’s nostalgia for the Great World and Life and the Secrets of the Earth.  But things do happen there eventually, and the time came when Zora found herself once again too big for the little house.  She missed Emmy’s periodical visits.  She missed the regulation of Septimus.  She missed her little motor expeditions with Sypher, who had sold his car and was about to sell “The Kurhaus, Kilburn Priory.”  The Cure seemed to have transformed itself from his heart to his nerves.  He talked of it—­or so it appeared to her—­with more braggadocio than enthusiasm.  He could converse of little