m with his immediate
destiny. At first he resisted. He would be a nuisance. Since his boyhood he
had never lived in a lady's house. Even landladies in lodgings had found
him impossible. He could not think of accepting more favors from her all
too gracious hands.

"You've got to do what you're told," said Zora, conclusively. She noticed a
shade of anxiety cross his face. "Is there anything else?"

"Wiggleswick. I don't know what's to become of him."

"He can come to Nunsmere and lodge with the local policeman," said Zora.

On the evening before they started from Paris she received a letter
addressed in a curiously feminine hand. It ran:

"DEAR MRS. MIDDLEMIST:

"I don't let the grass grow under my feet. I have bought Penton Court. I
have also started a campaign which will wipe the Jebusa Jones people off
the face of the earth they blacken. I hope you are finding a vocation.
When I am settled at Nunsmere we must talk further of this. I take a
greater interest in you than in any other woman I have ever known, and
that I believe you take an interest in me is the proud privilege of

"Yours very faithfully,
"CLEM SYPHER."

"Here are the three railway tickets, ma'am," said Turner, who had brought
up the letter. "I think we had better take charge of them."

Zora laughed, and when Turner had left the room she laughed again. Clem
Sypher's letter and Septimus's ticket lay side by side on her
dressing-table, and they appealed to her sense of humor. They represented
the net result of her misanthropic travels.

What would her mother say? What would Emmy say? What would be the superior
remark of the Literary Man from London?

She, Zora Middlemist, who had announced in the market place, with such a
flourish of trumpets, that she was starting on her glorious pilgrimage to
the Heart of Life, abjuring all conversation with the execrated male sex,
to have this ironical adventure! It was deliciously funny. Not only had she
found two men in the Heart of Life, but she was bringing them back with her
to Nunsmere. She could not hide them from the world in the secrecy of her
own memory: there they were in actual, bodily presence, the sole trophies
of her quest.

Yet she put a postscript to a letter to her mother.

"I know, in your dear romantic way, you will declare that these two men
have fallen in love with me. You'll be wrong. If they had, _I shouldn't
have anything to do with them. It would have made them qui