"How can I tell?" said he, with one of his swift, clear glances. "I meet you in the body every week and carry back your spirit with me. Zora Middlemist," he added abruptly, after a pause, "I implore you not to leave me." He leaned his arm on the mantelpiece from which Septimus had knocked the little china dog, and looked down earnestly at her, as she sat on the chintz-covered sofa behind the tea-table. At her back was the long casement window, and the last gleams of the wintry sun caught her hair. To the man's visionary fancy they formed an aureole. "Don't go, Zora." She was silent for a long, long time, as if held by the spell of the man's pleading. Her face softened adorably and a tenderness came into the eyes which he could not see. A mysterious power seemed to be lifting her towards him. It was a new sensation, pleasurable, like floating down a stream with the water murmuring in her ears. Then, suddenly, as if startled to vivid consciousness out of a dream, she awakened, furiously indignant. "Why shouldn't I go? Tell me once and for all, why?" She expected what any woman alive might have expected save the chosen few who have the great gift of reading the souls of the poet and the visionary; and Clem Sypher, in his way, was both. She braced her nerves to hear the expected. But the poet and the visionary spoke. It was the old story of the Cure, his divine mission to spread the healing unguent over the suffering earth. Voices had come to him as they had come to the girl at Domrémy, and they had told him that through Zora Middlemist, and no other, was his life's mission to be accomplished. To her it was anticlimax. Reaction forced a laugh against her will. She leaned back among the sofa cushions. "Is that all?" she said, and Sypher did not catch the significance of the words. "You seem to forget that the rôle of Mascotte is not a particularly active one. It's all very well for you, but I have to sit at home and twirl my thumbs. Have you ever tried that by way of soul-satisfying occupation? Don't you think you're just a bit--egotistical?" He relaxed the tension of his attitude with a sigh, thrust his hands into his pockets and sat down. "I suppose I am. When a man wants something with all the strength of his being and thinks of nothing else day or night, he develops a colossal selfishness. It's a form of madness, I suppose. There was a man called Bernard Palissy who had it, and made everybody sacrifice themselves to his idea. I've no right to ask you to sacrifice yourself to mine." "You have the right of friendship," said Zora, "to claim my interest in your hopes and fears, and that I've given you and shall always give you. But beyond that, as you say, you have no right."