s and things on mantelpieces."

Sypher said: "Do you know you've done me one of those services which one
man rarely does for another. I'll never forget it to my dying day. By
bringing her to me you've saved my reason. You've made me a different
being. I'm Clem Sypher--but, by God you're the Friend of Humanity."

Septimus looked at him with the terrified expression of a mediaeval
wrongdoer, writhing under an ecclesiastical curse. He made abject apology.

"It was the only thing I could do," said he.

"Of course it was. And that's why you did it. I never dreamed when you
told me to wait until I saw her before going mad or breaking my heart that
you meant to send for her. It has set me in front of a new universe."

He rose and stretched his large limbs and smiled confidently at the world
out of his clear blue eyes. Two little words of Zora had inspired him with
the old self-reliance and sense of predestination to great things. Out of
her own mouth had come the words which, when they had come out of
Rattenden's, had made his heart sink in despair. She had called him a "big
man." Like many big men, he was superstitious. He believed Rattenden's
prophetic utterance concerning Zora. He was, indeed, set in front of a new
universe, and Septimus had done it by means of the tail of a little china
dog.

As he was stretching himself, Wiggleswick shambled in, with the fear of
Zora written on his wrinkled brow, and removed the tray and the plate of
broken victuals. What had passed between them neither he nor Zora would
afterwards relate; but Wiggleswick spent the whole of that night and the
following days in unremitting industry, so that the house became spick and
span as his own well-remembered prison cells. There also was a light of
triumph in Zora's eyes when she entered a few moments afterwards with the
tea-tray, which caused Sypher to smile and a wicked feeling of content to
enter Septimus's mild bosom.

"I think it was high time I came home," she remarked, pouring out the tea.

The two men supported the proposition. The western hemisphere, where she
had tarried so long, could get on very well by itself. In the meantime the
old eastern hemisphere had been going to pieces. They had a gay little
meal. Now that Zora had settled Wiggleswick, arranged her plan of campaign
against Emmy, and established very agreeable and subtle relations between
Sypher and herself, she could afford to shed all her charm and gaiety and
graciousness