ave said obscure or enlighten your
guesses, we come back to the same link of union, which binds man to man,
bids States arise from the desert, and foeman embrace as brothers. I
need you and you need me; without your aid my life is doomed; without my
secret the breath will have gone from the lips of your Lilian before the
sun of to-morrow is red on the hill-tops."

"Fiend or juggler," I cried in rage, "you shall not so enslave and
enthrall me by this mystic farrago and jargon. Make your fantastic
experiment on yourself if you will: trust to your arts and your powers.
My Lilian's life shall not hang on your fiat. I trust it--to--"

"To what--to man's skill? Hear what the sage of the college shall tell
you, before I ask you again for your aid. Do you trust to God's saving
mercy? Ah, of course you believe in a God? Who, except a philosopher,
can reason a Maker away? But that the Maker will alter His courses to
hear you; that, whether or not you trust in Him, or in your doctor,
it will change by a hairbreadth the thing that must be--do you believe
this, Allen Fenwick?"

And there sat this reader of hearts! a boy in his aspect, mocking me and
the graybeards of schools.

I could listen no more; I turned to the door and fled down the stairs,
and heard, as I fled, a low chant: feeble and faint, it was still the
old barbaric chant, by which the serpent is drawn from its hole by the
charmer.

CHAPTER LXXVII.

To those of my readers who may seek with Julius Faber to explore,
through intelligible causes, solutions of the marvels I narrate,
Margrave's confession may serve to explain away much that my own
superstitious beliefs had obscured. To them Margrave is evidently
the son of Louis Grayle. The elixir of life is reduced to some simple
restorative, owing much of its effect to the faith of a credulous
patient: youth is so soon restored to its joy in the sun, with or
without an elixir. To them Margrave's arts of enchantment are reduced
to those idiosyncrasies of temperament on which the disciples of Mesmer
build up their theories,--exaggerated, in much, by my own superstitions;
aided, in part, by such natural, purely physical magic as, explored by
the ancient priest-crafts, is despised by the modern philosophies, and
only remains occult because Science delights no more in the slides of
the lantern which fascinated her childhood with simulated phantoms. To
them Margrave is, perhaps, an enthusiast, but, because an enthusia