te impossible_."

The energy with which she licked and closed the envelope was remarkable but
unnecessary.

CHAPTER VI

Things happen slowly at Nunsmere--from the grasping of an idea to the pace
of the church choir over the hymns. Life there is no vulgar, tearing
two-step, as it is in Godalming, London, and other vortices of human
passions, but the stately measure of a minuet. Delights are deliberate and
have lingering ends. A hen would scorn to hatch a chicken with the indecent
haste of her sister in the next parish.

Six months passed, and Zora wondered what had become of them. Only a few
visits to London, where she had consorted somewhat gaily with Emmy's
acquaintances, had marked their flight, and the gentle fingers of Nunsmere
had graduated the reawakening of her nostalgia for the great world. She
spoke now and then of visiting Japan and America and South Africa, somewhat
to her mother's consternation; but no irresistible force drove her thither.
She found contentment in procrastination.

It had also been a mild amusement to settle Septimus Dix, after his
recovery, in a little house facing the common. He had to inhabit some
portion of this planet, and as he had no choice of spot save Hackney Downs,
which Wiggleswick suggested, Zora waved her hand to the tenantless house
and told him to take it. As there was an outhouse at the end of the garden
which he could use as a workshop, his principal desideratum in a residence,
he obeyed her readily. She then bought his furniture, plate, and linen,
and a complicated kitchen battery over whose uses Wiggleswick scratched a
bewildered head.

"A saucepan I know, and a frying-pan I know, but what you're to put in
those things with holes in them fairly licks me."

"Perhaps we might grow geraniums in them," said Septimus brightly, alter a
fit of musing.

"If you do," said Zora, "I'll put a female cook in charge of you both, and
wash my hands of you."

Whereupon she explained the uses of a cullender, and gave Wiggleswick to
understand that she was a woman of her word, and that an undrained cabbage
would be the signal for the execution of her threat. From the first she had
assumed despotic power over Wiggleswick, of whose influence with his master
she had been absurdly jealous. But Wiggleswick, bent, hoary, deaf, crabbed,
evil old ruffian that he was, like most ex-prisoners instinctively obeyed
the word of command, and meekly accepted Zora as his taskmistress.

Fo