"You will give this to the woman to wear. You yourself will wear this plain silver band I now give you. The process may take days or weeks. When you are with her, cause your own ring to be always touching the crystal heart. Gradually she will grow weaker, while your own strength increases boundlessly. When she dies ... you will have earned perhaps seventy years more of life." "Must it be this way?" Thaddeus groaned, staring horrified at the baubles. "It is the only way," Bacon murmured. "If at any time you decide that you prefer death to immortality, destroy either the heart or the ring and you will not long survive it. Old age will come swiftly." Thaddeus got to his feet, his stomach a lump of ice in him. He suddenly felt a necessity to get into the open air, where he could think. Hastily he muttered: "I will do as you say, Friar Bacon. Thank you for what you have done. I will see that you are freed as soon as possible." Wise old Roger Bacon knew the struggle that was going on within the young lord, and he made no attempt to prolong the visit. "_Pax vobiscum_," he nodded soberly. "The Lord guide you in this." "Th-thank you, Friar!" Thaddeus faltered, and hastily fumbled at the door and left. * * * * * For a month the crystal heart and the ring lay untouched in a small chest in his treasure-room. Then his old fears and nightmares drove him to take them out. He had become accustomed to the grisly demands and they no longer loomed so blackly in his mind. Pictures of himself as an ancient ruin with the skin hanging loosely from all his bones helped in this. For a long time Thaddeus had known that the young daughter of Lord Cartwright secretly loved him. Tremblingly, one night, he bestowed on her the gift of death ... in the form of a tiny crystal pendant. Within a month the girl was dead. And Thaddeus Carlyle ... in his body surged and leaped such strength as he had never dreamed of. He felt he must live forever. His friends began to change, growing wrinkled and less virile, but never he. Soon he saw he must change his abode, lest men suspect him. It was ninety years before the need came upon him to renew the life-spirit in his body. He found a dark-eyed girl in Seville on one of his journeys whom he nominated for his second victim. It was easier, this time. Before she was laid away that old feeling of boundless youth was his again. And so Thaddeus Carlyle saw kings change and nations dissolve, saw a German named Gutenberg print the first book and an Englishman named William Shakespeare write the most perfect prose ever devised. Saw wars and tragedy and comedy, and grew sick with the seeing. Gladly would he have given it up, had he the courage.