"Oh, you can stay," she said with a half-laugh. "You're the kind of man
that always bets on a certainty."

Rattenden was right. She was jealous of Emmy for having unceremoniously
stolen her slave from her service--that Emmy had planned the whole
conspiracy she had not the slightest doubt--and she was angry with Septimus
for having been weak enough to lend himself to such duplicity. Even when he
wrote her a dutiful letter from Paris--to the telegram he had merely
replied, "Sorry; impossible"--full of everything save Emmy and their plans
for the future, she did not forgive him. How dared he consider himself fit
to travel by himself? His own servant qualified his doings as outlandish.

"They'll make a terrible mess of their honeymoon," she said to Clem Sypher.
"They'll start for Rome and find themselves in St. Petersburg."

"They'll be just as happy," said Sypher. "If I was on my honeymoon, do you
think I'd care where I went?"

"Well, I wash my hands of them," said Zora with a sigh, as if bereft of
dear responsibilities. "No doubt they're happy in their own way."

And that, for a long time, was the end of the matter. The house, cleaned
and polished, glittered like the instrument room of a man-of-war, and no
master or mistress came to bestow on Wiggleswick's toil the meed of their
approbation. The old man settled down again to well-earned repose, and the
house grew dusty and dingy again, and dustier and dingier as the weeks went
on.

It has been before stated that things happen slowly in Nunsmere, even the