Sypher clapped him on the shoulder and extolled him as a miracle of lucidity.  He explained magniloquently.  It was Zora’s unseen influence working magnetically from the other side of the world that had led his footsteps towards the Hotel Godet on that particular afternoon.  She had triumphantly vindicated her assertion that geographical location of her bodily presence could make no difference.

“I asked her to stay in England, you know,” he remarked more simply, seeing that Septimus lagged behind him in his flight.

“What for?”

“Why, to help me.  For what other reason?”

Septimus took off his hat and laid it on the chair vacated by Hegisippe, and ran his fingers reflectively up his hair.  Sypher lit another cigar.  Their side of the little street was deep in shade, but on half the road and on the other side of the way the fierce afternoon sunlight blazed.  The merchant of wine, who had been lounging in his dingy shirt-sleeves against the door-post, removed the glasses and wiped the table clear of the spilled tea.  Sypher ordered two more bocks for the good of the house, while Septimus, still lost in thought, brought his hair to its highest pitch of Struwel Peterdom.  Passers-by turned round to look at them, for well-dressed Englishmen do not often sit outside a Marchand des vins, especially one with such hair.  But passers-by are polite in France and do not salute the unfamiliar with ribaldry.

“Well,” said Sypher, at last.

“We’ve been speaking intimately,” said Septimus.  He paused, then proceeded with his usual diffidence.  “I’ve never spoken intimately to a man before, and I don’t quite know how to do it—­it must be just like asking a woman to marry you—­but don’t you think you were selfish?”

“Selfish?  How?”

“In asking Zora Middlemist to give up her trip to California, just for the sake of the Cure.”

“It’s worth the sacrifice,” Sypher maintained.

“To you, yes; but it mayn’t be so to her.”

“But she believes in the thing as I do myself!” cried Sypher.

“Why should she, any more than I, or Hegisippe Cruchot?  If she did, she would have stayed.  It would have been her duty.  You couldn’t expect a woman like Zora Middlemist to fail in her duty, could you?”

Sypher rubbed his eyes, as if he saw things mistily.  But they were quite clear.  It was really Septimus Dix who sat opposite, concentrating his discursive mind on Sypher’s Cure and implicitly denying Zora’s faith.  A simple-minded man in many respects, he would not have scorned to learn wisdom out of the mouths of babes and sucklings; but out of the mouth of Septimus what wisdom could possibly proceed?  He laughed his suggestion away somewhat blusteringly and launched out again on his panegyric of the Cure.  But his faith felt a quiver all through its structure, just as a great building does at the first faint shock of earthquake.