eary of life. If you are doing wrong, if you delude yourself in
following the unattainable, have I not shown you that my love could
share your faults, could walk beside you and be happy, though you led me
in the paths of crime? You loved me too well,--that was my glory; it is
now my death. Balthazar, my illness has lasted long; it began on the
day when here, in this place where I am about to die, you showed me that
Science was more to you than Family. And now the end has come; your wife
is dying, and your fortune lost. Fortune and wife were yours,--you could
do what you willed with your own; but on the day of my death my property
goes to my children, and you cannot touch it; what will then become of
you? I am telling you the truth; I owe it to you. Dying eyes see far;
when I am gone will anything outweigh that cursed passion which is now
your life? If you have sacrificed your wife, your children will count
but little in the scale; for I must be just and own you loved me
above all. Two millions and six years of toil you have cast into the
gulf,--and what have you found?"

At these words Claes grasped his whitened head in his hands and hid his
face.

"Humiliation for yourself, misery for your children," continued the
dying woman. "You are called in derision 'Claes the alchemist'; soon
it will be 'Claes the madman.' For myself, I believe in you. I know
you great and wise; I know your genius: but to the vulgar eye genius is
mania. Fame is a sun that lights the dead; living, you will be unhappy
with the unhappiness of great minds, and your children will be ruined.
I go before I see your fame, which might have brought me consolation for
my lost happiness. Oh, Balthazar! make my death less bitter to me, let
me be certain that my children will not want for bread--Ah, nothing,
nothing, not even you, can calm my fears."

"I swear," said Claes, "to--"

"No, do not swear, that you may not fail of your oath," she said,
interrupting him. "You owed us your protection; we have been without it
seven years. Science is your life. A great man should have neither wife
nor children; he should tread alone the path of sacrifice. His virtues
are not the virtues of common men; he belongs to the universe, he cannot
belong to wife or family; he sucks up the moisture of the earth about
him, like a majestic tree--and I, poor plant, I could not rise to the
height of your life, I die at its feet. I have waited for this last day
to tell you these d