sing
which he was waging against his rivals. These were days black with anxiety
and haunting doubt, illuminated now and then by Zora, who wrote gracious
letters of encouragement. He carried them about with him like talismans.

Sometimes he could not realize that the great business he had created could
be on the brink of failure. The routine went on as usual. At the works at
Bermondsey the same activity apparently prevailed as when the Cure had
reached the hey-day of its fortune some five years before. In the
sweet-smelling laboratory gleaming with white tiles and copper retorts, the
white-aproned workmen sorted and weighed and treated according to the
secret recipe the bundles of herbs that came in every day and were stacked
in pigeon-holes along the walls. In the boiling-sheds, not so
sweet-smelling, the great vats of fat bubbled and ran, giving out to the
cooling-troughs the refined white cream of which the precious ointment was
made. Beyond there was another laboratory vast and clean and busy, where
the healing ichor of the herbs was mixed with the drugs and the cream. Then
came the work-rooms where rows of girls filled the celluloid boxes, one
dabbing in the well-judged quantity, another cutting it off clean to the
level of the top with a swift stroke of the spatula, another fitting on the
lid, and so on, in endless but fascinating monotony until the last girl
placed on the trolley by her side, waiting to carry it to the packing-shed,
the finished packet of Sypher's Cure as it would be delivered to the world.
Then there were the packing-sheds full of deal cases for despatching the
Cure to the four quarters of the globe, some empty, some being filled,
others stacked in readiness for the carriers: a Babel of sounds, of
hammering clamps, of creaking barrows, of horses by the open doors rattling
their heavy harness and trampling the flagstones with their heavy hoofs; a
ceaseless rushing of brawny men in sackcloth aprons, of dusty men with
stumps of pencils and note-books and crumpled invoices, counting and
checking and reporting to other men in narrow glass offices against the
wall. Outside stood the great wagons laden with the white deal boxes bound
with iron hoops and bearing in vermilion letters the inscription of
Sypher's Cure.

Every detail of this complicated hive was as familiar to him as his kitchen
was to his cook. He had planned it all, organized it all. Every action of
every human creature in the place from t