"In the days and weeks that followed, Arnold de Villeneuve saw nothing of what was passing between the two. In his eyes Raymond Lulli was but a fellow-student. It did not occur to him that passion might find place even in the bosom of such an ardent follower of alchemy as this new scholar of his. He beheld only the philosopher and student; he forgot the man. For months the two labored and toiled like slaves, striving to discover those two secrets contained in the great Geber's book, and hidden beneath the strange formulas, the obscure words, and the mystic pictures. One day they seemed upon the very edge of success, the next day they failed, and had to begin again from the very beginning. The laboratory in which they conducted their great work was one in which Arnold de Villeneuve had already carried forward and completed some of his most secret, delicate, and successful operations. Within the wall of the garden back of his house he had had a hollow passage-way constructed, which ran for some little distance to the deep cellar-like vault that had, perhaps, at one time been the dungeon of some ancient fortress. Beneath this vault or dungeon were three rooms, opening one into another, that had in a far distant period been hewn out of the solid rock. They were the rooms from which you, Oliver, escaped only a little while ago. Two of those rooms were sumptuously and luxuriously furnished; the furthermost was the laboratory where the two great problems were solved--the problem of life and the problem of wealth. Such was the workshop in which the two labored together, occasionally for days at a time; the one sometimes sleeping while the other compounded new formulas or watched the progress of slow emulsions. [Illustration: "SUCH WAS THE WORKSHOP IN WHICH THE TWO LABORED TOGETHER."] "It was, as Arnold de Villeneuve had predicted, a long and toilsome labor which they had undertaken; it was, as the great Geber had said, a tremendous task to climb the steep mountain of knowledge and to pluck the mystic flower of wisdom from the top. But at last the summit was reached. Suddenly, one morning, unexpected success fell upon them like a flash of lightning; for this, like many other successes, happened through an accident-the overturning of a phial (the contents of which it had taken months to prepare) into a mortar in which Raymond was mixing a powder. It all happened in a moment-the accidental brushing of a sleeve-but that one moment was sufficient; the secret of life was discovered. From the secret of life to the secret of wealth was but a step; the one hung upon the other. The very next day they discovered that which shall make us-you, Oliver, and me, whom you may henceforth call 'master'-the richest men in France. Did you know that the diamond and the charcoal are the one and the same thing?" "No," said Oliver, "I did not; the one is black and the other is white."