an implied declaration.

"I'm fighting against the Powers of Darkness," he continued. "I once read a
bit of Spenser's 'Faerie Queene.' There was a Red Cross Knight who slew a
Dragon--but he had a fabulous kind of woman behind him. When I saw you, you
seemed that fabulous kind of woman."

At a sharp wall corner a clump of tall poinsettias flamed against the sky.
Zora laughed full-heartedly.

"Here we are in the middle of a Fairy Tale. What are the Powers of Darkness
in your case, Sir Red Cross Knight?"

"Jebusa Jones's Cuticle Remedy," said Sypher savagely.

CHAPTER V

That was Clem Sypher's Dragon--Jebusa Jones's Cuticle Remedy. He drew so
vivid a picture of its foul iniquity that Zora was convinced that the earth
had never harbored so scaly a horror. Of all Powers of Evil in the universe
it was the most devastating.

She was swept up by his eloquence to his point of view, and saw things with
his eyes. When she came to examine the poor dragon in the cool light of her
own reason it appeared at the worst to be but a pushful patent medicine of
an inferior order which, on account of its cheapness and the superior
American skill in distributing it, was threatening to drive Sypher's Cure
off the market.

"I'll strangle it as Hercules strangled the dog-headed thing," cried
Sypher.

He meant the Hydra, which wasn't dog-headed and which Hercules didn't
strangle. But a man can be at once unmythological and sincere. Clem Sypher
was in earnest.

"You talk as if your cure had something of a divine sanction," said Zora.
This was before her conversion.

"Mrs. Middlemist, if I didn't believe that," said Sypher solemnly, "do you
think I would have devoted my life to it?"

"I thought people ran these things to make money," said Zora.

It was then that Sypher entered on the exordium of the speech which
convinced her of the diabolical noisomeness of the Jebusa Jones unguent.
His peroration summed up the contest as that between Mithra and Ahriman.

Yet Zora, though she took a woman's personal interest in the battle
between Sypher's Cure and Jebusa Jones's Cuticle Remedy, siding loyally and
whole-heartedly with her astonishing host, failed to pierce to the
spirituality of the man--to divine him as a Poet with an Ideal.

"After all," said Sypher on the way back--Septimus, with his coat-collar
turned up over his ears, still sat on guard by the chauffeur, consoled by a
happy hour he had spent alone with his mistress af