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 Hotel 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 _imperiale_, 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.