"I broke the dog, you see," he explained luminously, "I knocked it off the mantelpiece. I'm always doing it. When Emmy has a decent house I'll invent something to keep dogs 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 mediæval 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 on her subjects. She was infinitely glad to be with them again. Nunsmere had unaccountably expanded; she breathed freely and no longer knocked her head against beams in bedroom ceilings.
She rallied Septimus on his new gun.