"Yet something of value to yourself," Blondel said, his head on one side. Basterga frowned, then shrugged his shoulders. "Well, yes," he said at length, "as it happens, I have. But a thing of no use to any one else, for the simple reason----" "That you have only enough for yourself!" The scholar looked astonished and a little offended. "I do not know how you learned that," he said curtly, "but you are right. I had no intention of telling you as much, but, as you have guessed that, I do not mind adding that it is a remedy for a disease which the most learned physicians do not pretend to cure." "A remedy?" "Yes, vital and certain." "And you discovered it?" "No, I did not discover it," Basterga replied modestly. "But the story is so long that I will ask you to excuse me." "I shall not excuse you if you do not favour me with it," the Syndic answered eagerly. As he leaned forward there was a light in his eyes that had not been in them a few minutes before. His hand, too, shook as he moved it from the arm of his chair to his knee. "Nay, but, I pray you, indulge me," he continued, in a tone anxious and almost submissive. "I shall not betray your secrets. I am no philosopher, and no physician, and, had I the will, I could make no use of your confidence." "That is true," Basterga replied. "And, after all, the matter is simple. I do not know why I should refuse to oblige you. I have said that I did not discover this remedy. That is so. But it happened that in trying, by way of amusement, certain precipitations, I obtained not that which I sought--nor had I expected," he continued, smiling, "to obtain that, for it was the Elixir of Life, which, as I have told you, does not exist--but a substance new in my experience, and which seemed to me to possess some peculiar properties. I tested it in all the ways known to me, but without benefit or enlightenment; and in the end I was about to cast it aside, when I chanced on a passage in the manuscript of Ibn Jasher--the same, in fact, that I showed you a few minutes ago." "And you found?" The Syndic's attitude as he leaned forward, with parted lips and a hand on each knee, betrayed an interest so abnormal that it was odd that Basterga did not notice it. Instead, "I found that he had made," the scholar replied quietly, "as far back as the tenth century the same experiment which I had just completed. And with the same result." "He obtained the substance?" Basterga nodded. "And discovered? What?" Blondel asked eagerly. "Its use?"