“I don’t know why you should say that,” said he.  “I never heard a joke I didn’t see the point of.  I’m rather good at it.”

“If you don’t see the point of this joke, I can’t explain it, my dear.  It has a point the size of a pyramid.”

He nodded and looked dreamily out of the window at the opposite houses.  Sometimes her sharp sayings hurt him.  But he understood all, in his dim way, and pardoned all.  He never allowed her to see him wince.  He stood so long silent that Emmy looked up anxiously at his face, dreading the effect of her words.  His hand hung by his side—­he was near the sofa where she lay.  She took it gently, in a revulsion of feeling, kissed it, and, as he turned, flung it from her.

“Go, my dear; go.  I’m not fit to talk to you.  Yes, go.  You oughtn’t to be here; you ought to be in England in your comfortable home with Wiggleswick and your books and inventions.  You’re too good for me, and I’m hateful.  I know it, and it drives me mad.”

He took her hand in his turn and held it for a second or two in both of his and patted it kindly.

“I’ll go out and buy something,” he said.

When he returned she was penitent and glad to see him; and although he brought her as a present a hat—­a thing of purple feathers and green velvet and roses, in which no self-respecting woman would be seen mummified a thousand years hence—­she neither laughed at it nor upbraided him, but tried the horror on before the glass and smiled sweetly while the cold shivers ran down her back.

“I don’t want you to say funny things, Septimus,” she said, reverting to the starting point of the scene, “so long as you bring me such presents as this.”

“It’s a nice hat,” he admitted modestly.  “The woman in the shop said that very few people could wear it.”

“I’m so glad you think I’m an exceptional woman,” she said.  “It’s the first compliment you have ever paid me.”

She shed tears, though, over the feathers of the hat, before she went to bed, good tears, such as bring great comfort and cleanse the heart.  She slept happier that night; and afterwards, whenever the devils entered her soul and the pains of hell got hold upon her, she recalled the tears, and they became the holy water of an exorcism.

Septimus, unconscious of this landmark in their curious wedded life, passed tranquil though muddled days in his room at the Hotel Godet.  A gleam of sunlight on the glazed hat of an omnibus driver, the stick of the whip and the horse’s ear, as he was coming home one day on the imperiale, put him on the track of a new sighting apparatus for a field gun which he had half invented some years before.  The working out of this, and the superintendence of the making of the model at some works near Vincennes, occupied much of his time and thought.  In matters appertaining to his passion he had practical notions of procedure; he would be at a loss to know where to buy a tooth-brush,