"You would make a carpet of your body for Zora Middlemist?"
"Why, of course," replied the other in perfect simplicity.
"Then, my friend, you're desperately in love with her."
There was kindness, help, sympathy in the big man's voice, and Septimus, though the challenge caused him agonies of shyness, did not find it in his heart to resent Sypher's logic.
"I suppose every man whom she befriends must feel the same towards her. Don't you?"
"I? I'm different. I've got a great work to carry through. I couldn't lie down for anybody to walk over me. My work would suffer—but in this mission of mine Zora Middlemist is intimately involved. I said it when I first saw her, and I said it just before she left for California. She is to stand by my side and help me. How, God knows." He laughed, seeing the bewildered face of Septimus, who had never heard of this transcendental connection of Zora with the spread of Sypher's Cure. "You seem to think I'm crazy. I'm not. I work everything on the most hard and fast common-sense lines. But when a voice inside you tells you a thing day and night, you must believe it."
Said Septimus: "If you had not met her, you wouldn't have met Hégisippe Cruchot, and so you wouldn't have got the idea of Army blisters."
Sypher clapped him on the shoulder and extolled him as a miracle of lucidity. He explained magniloquently. It was Zora's unseen influence working magnetically from the other side of the world that had led his footsteps towards the Hôtel Godet on that particular afternoon. She had triumphantly vindicated her assertion that geographical location of her bodily presence could make no difference.
"I asked her to stay in England, you know," he remarked more simply, seeing that Septimus lagged behind him in his flight.
"What for?"