, to meet Zora, lest he should betray the miserable secret, he
stuffed the newspaper into his pocket, and crept out of the house.

Before his own fire he puzzled over the problem. Something must be done.
But what? Hale Mordaunt Prince from his bride's arms and bring him penitent
to Nunsmere? What would be the good of that, seeing that polygamy is not
openly sanctioned by Western civilization? Proceed to Naples and chastise
him? That were better. The monster deserved it. But how are men chastised?
Septimus had no experience. He reflected vaguely that people did this sort
of thing with a horsewhip. He speculated on the kind of horsewhip that
would be necessary. A hunting crop with no lash would not be more effective
than an ordinary walking stick. With a lash it would be cumbrous, unless he
kept at an undignified distance and flicked at his victim as the
ring-master in the circus flicks at the clown. Perhaps horsewhips for this
particular purpose could be obtained from the Army and Navy Stores. It
should be about three feet long, flexible and tapering to a point.
Unconsciously his inventive faculty began to work. When he had devised an
adequate instrument, made of fine steel wires ingeniously plaited, he
awoke, somewhat shame-facedly, to the commonplaces of the original problem.
What was to be done?

He pondered for some hours, then he sighed and sought consolation in his
bassoon; but after a few bars of "Annie Laurie" he put the unedifying
instrument back in its corner and went out for a walk. It was a starry
night of frost. Nunsmere lay silent as Bethlehem; and a star hung low in
the east. Far away across the common gleamed one solitary light in the
vicarage windows; the Vicar, good gentleman, finishing his unruffled sermon
while his parish slept. Otherwise darkness spread over everything save the
sky. Not a creature on the road, not a creature on the common, not even the
lame donkey. Incredibly distant the faint sound of a railway whistle
intensified the stillness. Septimus's own footsteps on the crisp grass rang
loud in his ears. Yet both stillness and darkness felt companionable, in
harmony with the starlit dimness of the man's mind. His soul was having its
adventure while mystery filled the outer air. He walked on, wrapped in the
nebulous fantasies which passed with him for thought, heedless, as he
always was, of the flight of time. Once he halted by the edge of the pond,
and, sitting on a bench, lit and smoked his p