"I don't want you to say funny things, Septimus," she said, reverting to the starting point of the scene, "so long as you bring me such presents as this." "It's a nice hat," he admitted modestly. "The woman in the shop said that very few people could wear it." "I'm so glad you think I'm an exceptional woman," she said. "It's the first compliment you have ever paid me." She shed tears, though, over the feathers of the hat, before she went to bed, good tears, such as bring great comfort and cleanse the heart. She slept happier that night; and afterwards, whenever the devils entered her soul and the pains of hell got hold upon her, she recalled the tears, and they became the holy water of an exorcism. Septimus, unconscious of this landmark in their curious wedded life, passed tranquil though muddled days in his room at the Hôtel Godet. A gleam of sunlight on the glazed hat of an omnibus driver, the stick of the whip and the horse's ear, as he was coming home one day on the _impériale_, put him on the track of a new sighting apparatus for a field gun which he had half invented some years before. The working out of this, and the superintendence of the making of the model at some works near Vincennes, occupied much of his time and thought. In matters appertaining to his passion he had practical notions of procedure; he would be at a loss to know where to buy a tooth-brush, and be dependent on the ministrations of a postman or an old woman in a charcoal shop, but to the place where delicate instruments could be made he went straight, as instinctively and surely as a buffalo heads for water. Many of his books and papers had been sent him from time to time by Wiggleswick, who began to dread the post, the labor of searching and packing and dispatching becoming too severe a tax on the old villain's leisure. These lay in promiscuous heaps about the floor of his bedroom, stepping-stones amid a river of minor objects, such as collars and bits of india rubber and the day before yesterday's _Petit Journal_. The _femme de chambre_ and the dirty, indeterminate man in a green baize apron, who went about raising casual dust with a great feather broom, at first stowed the litter away daily, with jackdaw ingenuity of concealment, until Septimus gave them five francs each to desist; whereupon they desisted with alacrity, and the books became the stepping-stones aforesaid, stepping-stones to higher things. His only concern was the impossibility of repacking them when the time should come for him to leave the Hôtel Godet, and sometimes the more academic speculation as to what Zora would say should some miracle of levitation transport her to the untidy chamber. He could see her, radiant and commanding, dispelling chaos with the sweep of her parasol.