‘There can’t be a mistake,’ he went on, more now as if reasoning with himself than with his visitor, who was watching him, and was growing a little uneasy at the pallor that was showing itself round his nose and mouth—a pallor he had noticed very often of late when the old man was unduly excited or interested. ‘I have gone through it again and again. There is nothing new, of course, under the sun, and there can be little doubt but that it is an anæsthetic known to the Indians of Southern America years ago, and the Peruvians. There are records, but nothing sufficient to betray the secret. It was by the merest accident, as I have told you, that I stumbled on it. I have made many experiments. I have gone cautiously step by step, until now all is sure. So much for one hour. So much for six, so much for twenty-four, so much’—his voice rose almost to a scream, and he thumped his hand violently on the table—‘for seven days—for seven months!’ His voice broke off, and he sank back in his chair. The young man went quickly to a cupboard and poured out a glass of some white cordial. ‘Thank you—thank you,’ said the Professor, swallowing the nauseous mixture hurriedly, as though regretting the waste of time it took to drink it. ‘Why talk any more to-night?’ said the young man anxiously; ‘I am going abroad in a few days, but I can come again to see you to-morrow. It is late.’ He glanced at the clock, which pointed to ten minutes past eleven. The movement he made in pointing pushed aside his overcoat and showed that he was in evening dress. He had evidently been dining out, and had dropped in to see the Professor—an old trick of his—on his way home. ‘I must talk while I can,’ said the Professor, smiling. The cordial, whatever it was, had revived him, and he sat up and looked again at his companion with eyes that were brilliant. ‘As for this pain here,’ touching his side, ‘it is nothing—nothing. What I want to say, Paul, is this’—he bent towards Wyndham, and his lips quivered again with excitement: ‘If I could send a human creature to sleep for seven months, then why not for seven years—for ever?’ Wyndham looked at him incredulously. ‘But the last time——’ ‘The last time you were here, I had not quite perfected my discovery. But since then some of my experiments have led me to think—to be absolutely certain—that life can be sustained, with all the appearance of death upon the subject, for a full week at all events.’ ‘And when consciousness returns?’ ‘The subject treated wakes to life again in exactly the same condition as when he or she fell asleep—without loss of brain or body power.’ ‘Seven days! A long time!’ The young man smiled. ‘You bring back old thoughts and dreams. Are you a second Friar Laurence? Even he, though he could make the fair Juliet sleep till all believed her dead, could not prolong that unfortunate deception beyond a certain limit.