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Perhaps Emmy had spoken more truly than she thought. In his simple heart he realized himself to be the least effectual of men, apparently as unhelpful towards a great deliverance as the walking stick used by Moses. But if God had sent him to Nunsmere Common and destined him to be the mean instrument of Emmy's deliverance?
It would be far better, she declared, to shut the man up in an idiot asylum and bring Emmy to Nunsmere, where the child could have a decent upbringing. Zora dissented loftily, but declined to be led into a profitless argument. "All I ask of you, my dear Jane," said she, "is to take care of mother a little longer while I do what I consider my duty."
"Getting hats and frocks a trousseau of freedom. I've left Nunsmere. I'm on my own." Her eyes sparkled, her cheeks were flushed. She caught Emily to her bosom. "Oh, darling! I'm so happy a bird let out of a cage." "An awful big bird," laughed Emily. "Yes, let out of an awful small cage. I'm going to see the world, for the first time in my life.
Cousin Jane, who had had much to write concerning the elopement, was summoned, and Zora, with infinite baggage in the care of Turner, set sail for California. The New World lay before her with its chances of real, quivering, human Life. Nunsmere, where nothing ever happened, lay behind her.
Nunsmere was in a swarm of excitement and the alien bee had, perforce, to buzz with the rest. "The interesting thing is," said he, "that the thing has happened. That while the inhabitants of this smug village kept one dull eye on the decalogue and another on their neighbors, Romance on its rosy pinions was hovering over it. Two people have gone the right old way of man and maid.
Nunsmere had unaccountably expanded; she breathed freely and no longer knocked her head against beams in bedroom ceilings. She rallied Septimus on his new gun. "He's afraid of it," said Sypher. "What! Afraid of its going off?" she laughed. "Oh, no," said Septimus. "I've heard lots of them go off." "When?" asked Zora.
"The Nook, Nunsmere, Surrey, will always find me." "Nunsmere?" He paused, pencil in hand, and looked up at her as she stood framed in the railway carriage window. "I nearly bought a house there last year. I was looking out for one with a lawn reaching down to a main railway track. This one had it." "Penton Court?" "Yes. That was the name." "It's still unsold," laughed Zora idly.
Also, as Emmy unconsciously drew the overcoat away from him, one side of his body perished with cold; and a dinner suit is not warm enough for traveling on a frosty morning. The thought of his dinner jacket reminded him of his puzzledom. What were Emmy and himself doing in that galley of a railway carriage when they might have been so much more comfortable in their own beds in Nunsmere?
Another amenity in Septimus's peaceful existence was Emmy. Being at this time out of an engagement, she paid various flying visits to Nunsmere, bringing with her an echo of comic opera and an odor of Peau d'Espagne.
"I believe God sent you to Nunsmere Common last night." She left him, and he went back to the fire and filled and lit his pipe. Her words touched him. They also struck a chord of memory. His ever-wandering mind went back to a scene in undergraduate days. It was the Corn Exchange at Cambridge, where the most famous of all American evangelists was holding one of a series of revivalist meetings.
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