And this man was Judith's husband. Yet what was it to him whether she was happy or miserable? that old sweetheart of his, whose round white arms had been wreathed round his neck that night in the little Chinese room at Lady Skirmisham's, what time she swore she would be his wife, and urged him to be true to her. Well, he had not been true; he had played the fool with fortune, had sacrificed the one real love of his life to mere braggadocio and the idle vanity of an hour, and his reward was an empty heart. Vainly did he try to fan those red embers into a new flame, to burn before a new altar. He would have been very glad to fall in love with Squire Bosworth's daughter. Again and again he told himself that she was younger and lovelier than Judith, and that in her love he might find the renewal of his wasted youth, find contentment and length of years more surely than in that sacred art which old Vincenti had cultivated with the enthusiast's devotion for nearly half a century, and which seemed to have brought him but little nearer to those three great mysteries which he sought to fathom:-- The secret of illimitable wealth by the transmutation of meaner metals into gold and silver. The secret of prolonged existence, to be found in some universal panacea, guessed at, almost grasped, yet always escaping the seeker. And thirdly, the secret of intellectual power--the intercommunion of flesh and deity, the link between this mortal clay and the ethereal world of angels and demons. It seemed to Lavendale, in his dreams of the past and of the dead, in his vivid recalling of half-forgotten words, the touch, the kiss of long ago, that this communion between severed souls was not unknown to human sense. If it could thus be granted in our sleeping hours, why not also to our waking senses? To him there was something more than mere memory in the dreamer's commune with the dead. Vincenti pored over his old black-letter books: Roger Bacon's "Cure of Old Age;" or the "Art of Distillation, or Practical Physick, together with the preparation of Precipiolum, the Universal Medicine of Paracelsus;" or the "Golden Work of Hermes Trismegistus, translated out of Hebrew into Arabick, then into Greek, afterwards into Latin;" very precious volumes these, in the old Venetian's sight, treasuries of the wisdom of Eastern sages, hoarded up in the dim distance of the remote past to be the guide of searchers after truth in the present.