the untidy ways of
women with newspapers, lay discarded on the floor.

With Septimus's help Zora and the maid carried her to the sofa; they opened
the window and gave her smelling salts. Septimus anxiously desired to be
assured that she was not dying, and Zora thanked heaven that her mother
had gone to bed. Presently Emmy recovered consciousness.

"I must have fainted," she said in a whisper.

"Yes, dear," said Zora, kneeling by her side. "Are you better?"

Emmy stared past Zora at something unseen and terrifying.

"It was foolish. The heat, I suppose. Mr. Sypher's burning board." She
turned an appealing glance to Septimus. "Did I say anything silly?"

When he told her that she had slipped over the arm of the chair without a
word, she looked relieved and closed her eyes. As soon as she had revived
sufficiently she allowed herself to be led up-stairs; but before going she
pressed Septimus's hand with feverish significance.

Even to so inexperienced a mind as his the glance and the hand-shake
conveyed a sense of trust, suggested dimly a reason for the fainting fit.
Once more he stood alone and perplexed in the little drawing-room. Once
more he passed his long fingers through his Struwel Peter hair and looked
about the room for inspiration. Finding none, he mechanically gathered up
the two parts of the newspaper, with a man's instinct for tidiness in
printed matter, and smoothed out the crumples that Emmy's hand had made on
the outer sheet. Whilst doing so, a paragraph met his eye, causing him to
stare helplessly at the paper.

It was the announcement of the marriage of Mordaunt Prince at the British
Consulate in Naples.

The unutterable perfidy of man! For the first time in his guileless life
Septimus met it face to face. To read of human depravity in the police
reports is one thing, to see it fall like a black shadow across one's life
is another. It horrified him. Mordaunt Prince had committed the
unforgivable sin. He had stolen a girl's love, and basely, meanly, he had
slunk off, deceiving her to the last. To Septimus the lover who kissed and
rode away had ever appeared a despicable figure of romance. The fellow who
did it in real life proclaimed himself an unconscionable scoundrel. The
memory of Emmy's forget-me-not blue eyes turning into sapphires as she sang
the villain's praises smote him. He clenched his fists and put to
incoherent use his limited vocabulary of anathema. Then fearing, in his
excited state