It had also been a mild amusement to settle Septimus Dix, after his recovery, in a little house facing the common.  He had to inhabit some portion of this planet, and as he had no choice of spot save Hackney Downs, which Wiggleswick suggested, Zora waved her hand to the tenantless house and told him to take it.  As there was an outhouse at the end of the garden which he could use as a workshop, his principal desideratum in a residence, he obeyed her readily.  She then bought his furniture, plate, and linen, and a complicated kitchen battery over whose uses Wiggleswick scratched a bewildered head.

“A saucepan I know, and a frying-pan I know, but what you’re to put in those things with holes in them fairly licks me.”

“Perhaps we might grow geraniums in them,” said Septimus brightly, alter a fit of musing.

“If you do,” said Zora, “I’ll put a female cook in charge of you both, and wash my hands of you.”

Whereupon she explained the uses of a cullender, and gave Wiggleswick to understand that she was a woman of her word, and that an undrained cabbage would be the signal for the execution of her threat.  From the first she had assumed despotic power over Wiggleswick, of whose influence with his master she had been absurdly jealous.  But Wiggleswick, bent, hoary, deaf, crabbed, evil old ruffian that he was, like most ex-prisoners instinctively obeyed the word of command, and meekly accepted Zora as his taskmistress.

For Septimus began happy days wherein the clock was disregarded.  The vague projects that had filled his head for the construction of a new type of quick-firing gun took definite shape.  Some queer corner of his brain had assimilated a marvelous knowledge of field artillery, and Zora was amazed at the extent of his technical library, which Wiggleswick had overlooked in his statement of the salvage from the burned-down house at Shepherd’s Bush.  Now and then he would creep from the shyness which enveloped the inventive side of his nature, and would talk with her with unintelligible earnestness of these dreadful engines; of radial and initial hoop pressures, of drift angles, of ballistics, of longitudinal tensions, and would jot down trigonometrical formulae illustrated by diagrams until her brain reeled; or of his treatise on guns of large caliber just written and now in the printers’ hands, and of the revolution in warfare these astounding machines would effect.  His eyes would lose their dreamy haze and would become luminous, his nervous fingers would become effectual, the man would become transfigured; but as soon as the fervid fit passed off he would turn with amiable aimlessness to his usual irrelevance.  Sometimes he would work all night, either in his room or his workshop, at his inventions.  Sometimes he would dream for days together.  There was an old-fashioned pond in the middle of the common, with rough benches placed here and there at the brink.  Septimus loved to sit on one of them and look at the ducks.  He said