“I suppose you would do anything for her.”

“Yes.”

“So would I,” said Septimus, in a low voice.  “There are some women one lives for and others one dies for.”

“She is one of the women for whom one would live.”

Septimus shook his head.  “No, she’s the other kind.  It’s much higher.  I’ve had a lot of time to think the last few months,” he continued after a pause.  “I’ve had no one but Emmy and Hegisippe Cruchot to talk to—­and I’ve thought a great deal about women.  They usedn’t to come my way, and I didn’t know anything at all about them.”

“Do you now?” asked Sypher, with a smile.

“Oh, a great deal,” replied Septimus seriously.  “It’s astonishing what a lot of difference there is between them and between the ways men approach different types.  One woman a man wants to take by the hand and lead, and another—­he’s quite content if she makes a carpet of his body and walks over it to save her feet from sharp stones.  It’s odd, isn’t it?”

“Not very,” said Sypher, who took a more direct view of things than Septimus.  “It’s merely because he has got a kindly feeling for one woman and is desperately in love with the other.”

“Perhaps that’s it,” said Septimus.

Sypher again looked at him sharply, as a man does who thinks he has caught another man’s soul secret.  It was only under considerable stress of feeling that such coherence of ideas could have been expressed by his irrelevant friend.  What he had learned the last few minutes had been a surprise, a pain, and a puzzle to him.  The runaway marriage held more elements than he had imagined.  He bent forward confidentially.

“You would make a carpet of your body for Zora Middlemist?”

“Why, of course,” replied the other in perfect simplicity.

“Then, my friend, you’re desperately in love with her.”

There was kindness, help, sympathy in the big man’s voice, and Septimus, though the challenge caused him agonies of shyness, did not find it in his heart to resent Sypher’s logic.

“I suppose every man whom she befriends must feel the same towards her.  Don’t you?”

“I?  I’m different.  I’ve got a great work to carry through.  I couldn’t lie down for anybody to walk over me.  My work would suffer—­but in this mission of mine Zora Middlemist is intimately involved.  I said it when I first saw her, and I said it just before she left for California.  She is to stand by my side and help me.  How, God knows.”  He laughed, seeing the bewildered face of Septimus, who had never heard of this transcendental connection of Zora with the spread of Sypher’s Cure.  “You seem to think I’m crazy.  I’m not.  I work everything on the most hard and fast common-sense lines.  But when a voice inside you tells you a thing day and night, you must believe it.”

Said Septimus:  “If you had not met her, you wouldn’t have met Hegisippe Cruchot, and so you wouldn’t have got the idea of Army blisters.”