“All that is nothing!” he cried.  “A flea bite in the ocean.  It will right itself as the public realize how they are being taken in by these American and German impostors.  The Cure can’t fail.  And let me tell you, Dennymede, my son, the Cure is going to flourish as it has never flourished before.  I’ve got a scheme that will take your breath away.”

The glow of inspiration in Sypher’s blue eyes and the triumph written on his resolute face brought the features of the worried traveler for the first time into an expression of normal satisfaction with the world.

“I will stagger you to your commercial depths, my boy,” Sypher continued.  “Have a drink first before I tell you.”

He raised his champagne glass.  “To Sypher’s Cure!” They drank the toast solemnly.

And then Sypher unfolded to his awe-stricken subordinate the scheme for deblistering the heels of the armies of the world.  Dennymede, fired by his enthusiasm, again lifted his brimming glass.

“By God, sir, you are a conqueror, an Alexander, a Hannibal, a Napoleon!  There’s a colossal fortune in it.”

“And it will give me enough money,” said Sypher, “to advertise Jebusa Jones and the others off the face of the earth.”

“You needn’t worry about them, sir, when you’ve got the army contracts,” said the traveler.

He could not follow the spirituality underlying his chief’s remark.  Sypher laid down the peach he was peeling and looked pityingly at Dennymede as at one of little faith, one born to the day of small things.

“It will be all the more my duty to do so,” said he, “when the instruments are placed in my hands.  What, after all, is the healing of a few blistered feet, compared with the scourge of leprosy, eczema, itch, psoriasis, and what not?  And, as for the money itself, what is it?”

He preached his sermon.  The securing of the world’s army contracts was only a means towards the shimmering ideal.  It would clear the path of obstacles and leave the Cure free to pursue its universal way as consolatrix afflictorum.

The traveler finished his peach, and accepted another which his host hospitably selected for him.

“All the same, sir,” said he, “this is the biggest thing you’ve struck.  May I ask how you came to strike it?”

“Like all great schemes, it had humble beginnings,” said Sypher, in comfortable postprandial mood, unconsciously flattered by the admiration of his subordinate.  “Newton saw an apple drop to the ground:  hence the theory of gravitation.  The glory of Tyre and Sidon arose from the purple droppings of a little dog’s mouth who had been eating shell fish.  The great Cunarders came out of the lid of Stephenson’s family kettle.  A soldier happened to tell me that his mother had applied Sypher’s Cure to his blistered heels—­and that was the origin of the scheme.”

He leaned back in his chair, stretched out his legs and put one foot over the other.  He immediately started back with a cry of pain.