seem to care
for any one but yourself; and in yourself you find an unbroken sunny
holiday,--high spirits, youth, health, beauty, wealth. Happy boy!"

At that moment my heart was heavy within me.

Margrave resumed,--

"Among the secrets which your knowledge places at the command of your
art, what would you give for one which would enable you to defy and
to deride a rival where you place your affections, which could lock to
yourself, and imperiously control, the will of the being whom you desire
to fascinate, by an influence paramount, transcendent?"

"Love has that secret," said I,--"and love alone."

"A power stronger than love can suspend, can change love itself. But if
love be the object or dream of your life, love is the rosy associate
of youth and beauty. Beauty soon fades, youth soon departs. What if
in nature there were means by which beauty and youth can be fixed into
blooming duration,--means that could arrest the course, nay, repair the
effects, of time on the elements that make up the human frame?"

"Silly boy! Have the Rosicrucians bequeathed to you a prescription for
the elixir of life?"

"If I had the prescription I should not ask your aid to discover its
ingredients."

"And is it in the hope of that notable discovery you have studied
chemistry, electricity, and magnetism? Again I say, Silly boy!"

Margrave did not heed my reply. His face was overcast, gloomy, troubled.

"That the vital principle is a gas," said he, abruptly, "I am fully
convinced. Can that gas be the one which combines caloric with oxygen?"

"Phosoxygen? Sir Humphrey Davy demonstrates that gas not to be, as
Lavoisier supposed, caloric, but light, combined with oxygen; and he
suggests, not indeed that it is the vital principle itself, but the
pabulum of life to organic beings." (1)

"Does he?" said Margrave, his, face clearing up. "Possibly, possibly,
then, here we approach the great secret of secrets. Look you, Allen
Fenwick: I promise to secure to you unfailing security from all the
jealous fears that now torture your heart; if you care for that fame
which to me is not worth the scent of a flower, the balm of a breeze,
I will impart to you a knowledge which, in the hands of ambition, would
dwarf into commonplace the boasted wonders of recognized science. I will
do all this, if, in return, but for one month you will give yourself up
to my guidance in whatever experiments I ask, no matter how wild they
may seem to you."

"My