the sister as he did?  Why live apart from her, having married her?  And the child?  It was all a mystery in which he did not see clear.  He pitied the ineffectuality of Septimus with the kind yet half-contemptuous pity of the strong man with a fine nature.  But as for his denial of Zora’s faith, he laughed it away.  Egotistical, yes.  Zora had posed the same question as Septimus and he had answered it.  But her faith in the Cure itself, his mission to spread it far and wide over the earth, and to save the nations from vulgar competitors who thought of nothing but sordid gain—­that, he felt sure, remained unshaken.

Yet as he walked along, in the alien though familiar city, he was smitten, as with physical pain, by a craving for her presence, for the gleam of her eyes, for the greatness of sympathy and comprehension that inhabited her generous and beautiful frame.  The need of her was imperious.  He stopped at a cafe on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, called for the wherewithal to write, and like a poet in the fine frenzy of inspiration, poured out his soul to her over the heels of the armies of the world.

He had walked a great deal during the day.  When he stepped out of the cab that evening at the Gare de Lyon, he felt an unfamiliar stinging in his heel.  During the process of looking after his luggage and seeking his train he limped about the platform.  When he undressed for the night in his sleeping compartment, he found that a ruck in his sock had caused a large blister.  He regarded it with superstitious eyes, and thought of the armies of the world. In hoc signo vinces! The message had come from heaven.

He took a sample box of Sypher’s Cure from his handbag, and, almost with reverence, anointed his heel.

CHAPTER XIV

Clem Sypher slept the sleep of the warrior preparing for battle.  When he awoke at Lyons he had all the sensations of a wounded Achilles.  His heel smarted and tingled and ached, and every time he turned over determined on a continuation of slumber, his foot seemed to occupy the whole width of the berth.  He reanointed himself and settled down again.  But wakefulness had gripped him.  He pulled up the blinds of the compartment and let the dawn stream in, and, lying on his back, gave himself up to the plans of his new campaign.  The more he thought out the scheme the simpler it became.  He had made it his business to know personages of high influence in every capital in Europe.  Much of his success had already been gained that way.  The methods of introduction had concerned him but little.  For social purposes they could have been employed only by a pushing upstart; but in the furtherance of a divine mission the apostle does not bind his inspired feet with the shackles of ordinary convention.  Sypher rushed in, therefore, where the pachyderms of Park Lane would have feared to tread.  Just as the fanatical evangelist has no compunction in