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
he was fascinated by the way they wagged their tails. It suggested an
invention: of what nature he could not yet determine. He also formed a