her kind. It's much higher. I've
had a lot of time to think the last few months," he continued after a
pause. "I've had no one but Emmy and Hegisippe Cruchot to talk to--and I've
thought a great deal about women. They usedn't to come my way, and I didn't
know anything at all about them."

"Do you now?" asked Sypher, with a smile.

"Oh, a great deal," replied Septimus seriously. "It's astonishing what a
lot of difference there is between them and between the ways men approach
different types. One woman a man wants to take by the hand and lead, and
another--he's quite content if she makes a carpet of his body and walks over
it to save her feet from sharp stones. It's odd, isn't it?"

"Not very," said Sypher, who took a more direct view of things than
Septimus. "It's merely because he has got a kindly feeling for one woman
and is desperately in love with the other."

"Perhaps that's it," said Septimus.

Sypher again looked at him sharply, as a man does who thinks he has caught
another man's soul secret. It was only under considerable stress of feeling
that such coherence of ideas could have been expressed by his irrelevant
friend. What he had learned the last few minutes had been a surprise, a
pain, and a puzzle to him. The runaway marriage held more elements than he
had imagined. He bent forward confidentially.

"You would make a carpet of your body for Zora Middlemist?"

"Why, of course," replied the other in perfect simplicity.

"Then, my friend, you're desperately in love with her."

There was kindness, help, sympathy in the big man's voice, and Septimus,
though the challenge caused him agonies of shyness, did not find it in his
heart to resent Sypher's logic.

"I suppose every man whom she befriends must feel the same towards her.
Don't you?"

"I? I'm different. I've got a great work to carry through. I couldn't lie
down for anybody to walk over me. My work would suffer--but in this mission
of mine Zora Middlemist is intimately involved. I said it when I first saw
her, and I said it just before she left for California. She is to stand by
my side and help me. How, God knows." He laughed, seeing the bewildered
face of Septimus, who had never heard of this transcendental connection of
Zora with the spread of Sypher's Cure. "You seem to think I'm crazy. I'm
not. I work everything on the most hard and fast common-sense lines. But
when a voice inside you tells you a thing day and night, you must believe
it."