t she
could not read. Her eyes, travelling about the room, rested here and there
on the trophies and the guns and the wild implements of destruction
collected by the hunter, who was now lying upstairs, like a child dandled
on the dark knees of death.

The books on philosophy, natural history, oceanography, and history, in
their narrow cases contrasted strangely with the weapons of destruction
and the relics of the wild. The room was like a mirror of the mind of
Berselius, that strange mind in which the savage dwelt with the civilized
man, and the man of valour by the side of the philosopher.

But the strangest contrast in the room was effected by Maxine herself--the
creation of Berselius--his child, blossoming like a beautiful and fragile
flower, amidst the ruins of the things he had destroyed.

When, after daybreak, Adams came to find her, she was asleep.

Berselius, awaking from a sleep that had followed the effects of the
anaesthetic, had asked for her.

Thenard had fixed upon the white marble bathroom adjoining Berselius's
sleeping chamber as his operating theatre, and after the operation the
weakness of the patient was so great, and the night so hot, they
determined to make up a bed for him there, as it was the coolest room in
the house.

It was a beautiful room. Walls, pillars, floor and ceiling, of pure white
Carrara marble, and in the floor, near the window, a sunk bath, which,
when not in use, was covered by a grating of phosphor bronze, showing a
design of sea serpents and seaweed. There were no basins or lavatory
arrangements, nothing at all to break the pure and simple charm of this
ideal bathing-place whose open French window showed, beyond a balcony of
marble, the tops of trees waving against the blue sky of early morning.

Berselius was lying on the bed which had been arranged for him near the
door; his eyes were fixed on the waving tree tops. He turned his head
slightly when Maxine entered, and looked at her long and deliberately.

In that one glance Maxine saw all. He was himself again. The old,
imperious expression had returned; just a trace of the half-smile was
visible about his lips.

The great weakness of the man, far from veiling the returned personality,
served as a background which made it more visible. One could see the will
dominating the body, and the half-helpless hands lying on the coverlet
presented a striking contrast to the inextinguishable fire of the eye.

Maxine sat down on