"
One beautiful afternoon in June on her return from the graveyard, whither
she regularly took the boy, and where she herself carefully tended the
white roses on Bianca's grave, she found the doctor stretched on the
sofa, instead of being in the laboratory as usual, and as he sighed
heavily when she entered, she asked him respectfully what it was that
oppressed him.
At first he shook his head as if he wished to be left alone, but when
she, in spite of this, remained and he noticed that her gray eyes were
full of tears, he suddenly remembered that by the side of his mother's
coffin, and more recently at Bianca's death-bed they had wept together,
then his full heart overflowed, and gasping and shaken by his cough he
burst forth with: "It will soon be over--I feel it within me, and yet I
am no nearer to the goal. All the elements of nature I have called to my
aid--all the spirits 'twixt Heaven and Earth over whom necromancy has any
power have I made subject to my will and have commanded them to help me
--to what end? There stands the elixir and is hardly more valuable than
the small beer with which the servant down-stairs quenches his thirst,
indeed it is less useful for who derives any benefit from it? I shall
quit this world an unhappy man who has wasted his life and talents in
untold efforts from his school-days until now--and yet, if the spirit
would only reveal to me the missing substance which should give to this
liquid in my hand the power that it once possessed, gladly would I
sacrifice twenty lives! Oh! you faithful old soul, you can never
understand it, I know.
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