h a gesture, and looked at her clear and full.

"God bless you," he said. "My heart didn't lie to me at Monte Carlo when it
told me that you were a great-souled woman. Tell me. Have you ever believed
in the Cure in the sense that I believed in it?"

Zora returned his gaze. Here was no rhodomontading. The man was grappling
with realities.

"No," she replied simply.

"Neither do I any longer," said Sypher. "There is no difference between it
and any quack ointment you can buy at the first chemist's shop. That is
why, even if I saw a chance of putting the concern on its legs again, I
couldn't use your money. That is why I asked you, just now, what you have
thought of me--a madman or a quack?"

"Doesn't the mere fact of my being here show you what I thought of you?"

"Forgive me," he said. "It's wrong to ask you such questions."

"It's worse than wrong. It's unnecessary."

He passed his hands over his eyes, and sat down.

"I've gone through a lot to-day. I'm not quite myself, so you must forgive
me if I say unnecessary things. God sent you to me this morning. Septimus
was His messenger. If you hadn't appeared just now I think I should have
gone into black madness."

"Tell me all about it," she said softly. "All that you care to tell. I am
your nearest friend--I think."

"And dearest."

"And you are mine. You and Septimus. I've seen hundreds of people since
I've been away, and some seem to have cared for me--but there's no one
really in my life but you two."

Sypher thought: "And we both love you with all there is in us, and you
don't know it." He also thought jealously: "Who are the people that have
cared for you?"

He said: "No one?"

A smile parted her lips as she looked him frankly in the eyes and repeated
the negative. He breathed a sigh of relief, for he had remembered
Rattenden's prophecy of the big man whom she was seeking, of the love for
the big man, the gorgeous tropical sunshine in which all the splendor in
her could develop. She had not found him. From the depths of his man's
egotism he uttered a prayer of thanksgiving.

"Tell me," she said again.

"Do you remember my letter from Paris in the summer?"

"Yes. You had a great scheme for the armies of the world."

"That was the beginning," said he, and then he told her all the grotesque
story to the end, from the episode of the blistered heel. He told her
things that he had never told himself; things that startled him when he
found them expre