and be dependent on the ministrations of a postman or an old woman in a charcoal shop, but to the place where delicate instruments could be made he went straight, as instinctively and surely as a buffalo heads for water.  Many of his books and papers had been sent him from time to time by Wiggleswick, who began to dread the post, the labor of searching and packing and dispatching becoming too severe a tax on the old villain’s leisure.  These lay in promiscuous heaps about the floor of his bedroom, stepping-stones amid a river of minor objects, such as collars and bits of india rubber and the day before yesterday’s Petit Journal.  The femme de chambre and the dirty, indeterminate man in a green baize apron, who went about raising casual dust with a great feather broom, at first stowed the litter away daily, with jackdaw ingenuity of concealment, until Septimus gave them five francs each to desist; whereupon they desisted with alacrity, and the books became the stepping-stones aforesaid, stepping-stones to higher things.  His only concern was the impossibility of repacking them when the time should come for him to leave the Hotel Godet, and sometimes the more academic speculation as to what Zora would say should some miracle of levitation transport her to the untidy chamber.  He could see her, radiant and commanding, dispelling chaos with the sweep of her parasol.

There were few moments in the day when he did not crave her presence.  It had been warmth and sunshine and color to him for so long that now the sun seemed to have disappeared from the sky, leaving the earth a chill monochrome.  Life was very difficult without her.  She had even withdrawn from him the love “in a sort of way” to which she had confessed.  The goddess was angry at the slight cast on her by his secret marriage.  And she was in California, a myriad of miles away.  She could not have been more remote had she been in Saturn.  When Emmy asked him whether he did not long for Wiggleswick and the studious calm of Nunsmere, he said, “No.”  And he spoke truly; for wherein lay the advantage of one spot on the earth’s surface over another, if Zora were not the light thereof?  But he kept his reason in his heart.  They rarely spoke of Zora.

Of the things that concerned Emmy herself so deeply, they never spoke at all.  Of her hopes and fears for the future he knew nothing.  For all that was said between them, Mordaunt Prince might have been the figure of a dream that had vanished into the impenetrable mists of dreamland.  To the girl he was a ghastly memory which she strove to hide in the depths of her soul.  Septimus saw that she suffered, and went many quaint and irrelevant ways to alleviate her misery.  Sometimes they got on her nerves; more often they made the good tears come.  Once she was reading a tattered volume of George Eliot which she had picked up during a stroll on the quays, and calling him over to her side pointed out a sentence:  “Dogs are the best friends, they are always ready with their sympathy and they ask no questions.”