"Do you think it will?" he asked seriously. "If you do, I'll come."
But at Versailles they lost him, and the party, as a party, knew him no more. What he did with himself in Paris Zora could not imagine. A Cambridge acquaintance—one of the men on his staircase who had not yet terminated his disastrous career—ran across him in the Boulevard Sévastopol.
"Why—if it isn't the Owl! What are you doing?"
"Oh—hooting," said Septimus.
Which was more information as to his activities than he vouchsafed to give Zora. Once he murmured something about a friend whom he saw occasionally. When she asked him where his friend lived he waved an indeterminate hand eastwards and said, "There!" It was a friend, thought Zora, of whom he had no reason to be proud, for he prevented further questioning by adroitly changing the conversation to the price of hams.
"But what are you going to do with hams?"
"Nothing," said Septimus, "but when I see hams hanging up in a shop I always want to buy them. They look so shiny."
Zora's delicate nostrils sniffed the faintest perfume of a mystery; but a moment afterwards the Callenders carried her off to Ledoyen's and Longchamps and other indubitable actualities in which she forgot things less tangible. Long afterwards she discovered that the friend was an old woman, a marchande des quatre saisons who sold vegetables in the Place de la République. He had known her many years, and as she was at the point of death he comforted her with blood-puddings and flowers and hams and the ministrations of an indignant physician. But at the time Septimus hid his Good Samaritanism under a cloud of vagueness.
Then came a period during which Zora lost him altogether. Days passed. She missed him. Life with the Callenders was a continuous shooting of rapids. A quiet talk with Septimus was an hour in a backwater, curiously restful. She began to worry. Had he been run over by an omnibus? Only an ever-recurring miracle could bring him safely across the streets of a great city. When the Callenders took her to the Morgue she dreaded to look at the corpses.
"I do wish I knew what has become of him," she said to Turner.