ou are helping it on more than you imagine. I'm going
through a rough time, but with you behind me, as I told you before, I know
I shall win. If I turn my head round, when I'm sitting at my desk, I have a
kind of fleeting vision of you hovering over my chair. It puts heart and
soul into me, and gives me courage to make desperate ventures."

"As I'm only there in the spirit, it doesn't matter whether the bodily I
is in Nunsmere or Los Angeles."

"How can I tell?" said he, with one of his swift, clear glances. "I meet
you in the body every week and carry back your spirit with me. Zora
Middlemist," he added abruptly, after a pause, "I implore you not to leave
me."

He leaned his arm on the mantelpiece from which Septimus had knocked the
little china dog, and looked down earnestly at her, as she sat on the
chintz-covered sofa behind the tea-table. At her back was the long casement
window, and the last gleams of the wintry sun caught her hair. To the man's
visionary fancy they formed an aureole.

"Don't go, Zora."

She was silent for a long, long time, as if held by the spell of the man's
pleading. Her face softened adorably and a tenderness came into the eyes
which he could not see. A mysterious power seemed to be lifting her towards
him. It was a new sensation, pleasurable, like floating down a stream with
the water murmuring in her ears. Then, suddenly, as if startled to vivid
consciousness out of a dream, she awakened, furiously indignant.

"Why shouldn't I go? Tell me once and for all, why?"

She expected what any woman alive might have expected save the chosen few
who have the great gift of reading the souls of the poet and the visionary;
and Clem Sypher, in his way, was both. She braced her nerves to hear the
expected. But the poet and the visionary spoke.

It was the old story of the Cure, his divine mission to spread the healing
unguent over the suffering earth. Voices had come to him as they had come
to the girl at Domremy, and they had told him that through Zora Middlemist,
and no other, was his life's mission to be accomplished.

To her it was anticlimax. Reaction forced a laugh against her will. She
leaned back among the sofa cushions.

"Is that all?" she said, and Sypher did not catch the significance of the
words. "You seem to forget that the role of Mascotte is not a particularly
active one. It's all very well for you, but I have to sit at home and twirl
my thumbs. Have you ever tried that by way of