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.