d-fashion, as though to make sure she was loyal and worthy of
confidence, and then he said:

"I invent 'em. I have written a treatise on guns of large caliber."

"Really?" cried Zora, taken by surprise. She had not credited him with so
serious a vocation. "Do tell me something about it."

"Not now," he pleaded. "Some other time. I'd have to sit down with paper
and pencil and draw diagrams. I'm afraid you wouldn't like it. Wiggleswick
doesn't. It bores him. You must be born with machinery in your blood.
Sometimes it's uncomfortable."

"To have cogwheels instead of corpuscles must be trying," said Zora
flippantly.

"Very," said he. "The great thing is to keep them clear of the heart."

"What do you mean?" she asked quickly.

"Whatever one does or tries to do, one should insist on remaining human.
It's good to be human, isn't it? I once knew a man who was just a
complicated mechanism of brain encased in a body. His heart didn't beat; it
clicked and whirred. It caused the death of the most perfect woman in the
world."

He looked dreamily into the blue ether between sea and sky. Zora felt
strangely drawn to him.

"Who was it?" she asked softly.

"My mother," said he.

They had paused in their stroll, and were leaning over the parapet above
the railway line. After a few moments' silence he added, with a faint
smile:--

"That's why I try hard to keep myself human--so that, if a woman should
ever care for me, I shouldn't hurt her."

A green caterpillar was crawling on his sleeve. In his vague manner he
picked it tenderly off and laid it on the leaf of an aloe that grew in the
terrace vase near which he stood.

"You couldn't even hurt that crawling thing--let alone a woman," said Zora.
This time very softly.

He blushed. "If you kill a caterpillar you kill a butterfly," he said
apologetically.

"And if you kill a woman?"

"Is there anything higher?" said he.

She made no reply, her misanthropical philosophy prompting none. There was
rather a long silence, which he broke by asking her if she read Persian. He
excused his knowledge of it by saying that it kept him human. She laughed
and suggested a continuance of their stroll. He talked disconnectedly as
they walked up and down.

The crowd on the terrace thinned as the hour of dejeuner approached.
Presently she proclaimed her hunger. He murmured that it must be near
dinner time. She protested. He passed his hands across his eyes and
confessed that he had g