atted it kindly.

"I'll go out and buy something," he said.

When he returned she was penitent and glad to see him; and although he
brought her as a present a hat--a thing of purple feathers and green velvet
and roses, in which no self-respecting woman would be seen mummified a
thousand years hence--she neither laughed at it nor upbraided him, but
tried the horror on before the glass and smiled sweetly while the cold
shivers ran down her back.

"I don't want you to say funny things, Septimus," she said, reverting to
the starting point of the scene, "so long as you bring me such presents as
this."

"It's a nice hat," he admitted modestly. "The woman in the shop said that
very few people could wear it."

"I'm so glad you think I'm an exceptional woman," she said. "It's the first
compliment you have ever paid me."

She shed tears, though, over the feathers of the hat, before she went to
bed, good tears, such as bring great comfort and cleanse the heart. She
slept happier that night; and afterwards, whenever the devils entered her
soul and the pains of hell got hold upon her, she recalled the tears, and
they became the holy water of an exorcism.

Septimus, unconscious of this landmark in their curious wedded life, passed
tranquil though muddled days in his room at the Hotel Godet. A gleam of
sunlight on the glazed hat of an omnibus driver, the stick of the whip and
the horse's ear, as he was coming home one day on the _imperiale_, put him
on the track of a new sighting apparatus for a field gun which he had half
invented some years before. The working out of this, and the
superintendence of the making of the model at some works near Vincennes,
occupied much of his time and thought. In matters appertaining to his
passion he had practical notions of procedure; he would be at a loss to
know where to buy a tooth-brush, and be dependent on the ministrations of a
postman or an old woman in a charcoal shop, but to the place where delicate
instruments could be made he went straight, as instinctively and surely as
a buffalo heads for water. Many of his books and papers had been sent him
from time to time by Wiggleswick, who began to dread the post, the labor of
searching and packing and dispatching becoming too severe a tax on the old
villain's leisure. These lay in promiscuous heaps about the floor of his
bedroom, stepping-stones amid a river of minor objects, such as collars and
bits of india rubber and the day before yeste