. He could see no nobility in it, having done so
much enforced labour in his time.

"Do you think we need begin now, ma'am?" he asked anxiously.

"At once," said Zora. "It will take you a month to clean the place. And it
will give you something to do."

She went away femininely consoled by her exercise of authority--a minor
victory covering a retreat. But she still felt very angry with Septimus.

When Clem Sypher came down to Penton Court for the week-end, he treated
the matter lightly.

"He knew that he was acceptable to your mother and yourself, so he has done
nothing dishonorable. All he wanted was your sister and the absence of
fuss. I think it sporting of him. I do, truly."

"And I think you're detestable!" cried Zora. "There's not a single man that
can understand."

"What do you want me to understand?"

"I don't know," said Zora, "but you ought to understand it."

A day or two later, meeting Rattenden again, she found that he comprehended
her too fully.

"What would have pleased you," said he, "would have been to play the _soeur
noble_, to have gathered the young couple in your embrace, and
magnanimously given them to each other, and smiled on the happiness of
which you had been the bounteous dispenser. They've cheated you. They've
cut your part clean out of the comedy, and you don't like it. If I'm not
right will you kindly order me out of the room? Well?" he asked, after a
pause, during which she hung her head.

"Oh, you can stay," she said with a half-laugh. "You're the kind of man
that always bets on a certainty."

Rattenden was right. She was jealous of Emmy for having unceremoniously
stolen her slave from her service--that Emmy had planned the whole
conspiracy she had not the slightest doubt--and she was angry with Septimus
for having been weak enough to lend himself to such duplicity. Even when he
wrote her a dutiful letter from Paris--to the telegram he had merely
replied, "Sorry; impossible"--full of everything save Emmy and their plans
for the future, she did not forgive him. How dared he consider himself fit
to travel by himself? His own servant qualified his doings as outlandish.

"They'll make a terrible mess of their honeymoon," she said to Clem Sypher.
"They'll start for Rome and find themselves in St. Petersburg."

"They'll be just as happy," said Sypher. "If I was on my honeymoon, do you
think I'd care where I went?"

"Well, I wash my hands of them," said Zora with a sigh, as if b