And he, the Star-Dreamer? He had been called back from his unnatural life of solitude, step by step had been brought down from his height, had been taught once more to see the fairness of earth, had been made to feel the desire of the eyes, to hear the cry of his forgotten manhood: all to the end of this vault, this chamber of death, this knowledge of loss. Yet, no! She had once said to him in an unforgettable hour: “Sometimes a harboured sorrow is only fancied, not real; and it may be that real adversity must come to make us see it.” And now he felt that she had been right. His reawakened virility was strong within him. True, he had for a second time, and in middle life, been struck to the heart; yet, strange working of Fate! the new sorrow seemed not only to drive away the last remnant of the old, but actually to strengthen and arm him again for the fight of life. Although from his long sleep he had carried forth no conscious memory of a dream, that hour spent in Ellinor’s room when, in the body’s weakness, his spirit had come so close to hers, had left an ineffaceable stamp upon his mind. He had asked her, in trouble: “Can I trust you?” She had answered him: “To the death,” and he had believed. And now, though he had seen her stand self-accused before him, he believed still. The crisis often heralds the cure. He was cured of his strange palsy of mind, of his infirmity of purpose, of his sick melancholy. He was a fighting man again in a world where everything must be fought for, above all things happiness. Cured—aye, but too late! She, the joy he might but a few weeks before have taken for his own, she had passed from his gates. Cured, made strong again.... How? By what? In that soothing draught, of whose nature he had known nothing, but which her own hand had prepared, had she steeped a branch of that wondrous plant which held so many unknown properties? Had that given him a new life and sanity while it had brought death or madness to others? Ah, no! The transformation was her own doing. She had found him weak and ignorant of the one beauty of life, and left him strong, awakened. Awakened, but desolate. CHAPTER XIX GREY DEPARTURE Here then she comes.—I’ll have a bout with thee: Devil, or devil’s dam!... Blood will I draw on thee—thou art a witch! And straightway give thy soul to him thou serv’st! —SHAKESPEARE (_Henry VI._) The next morning, at an hour unwontedly early for such a ceremony, they laid Master Simon’s remains to rest in the family vault. The discontent in the village, aroused by the series of mishaps attendant on the simpler’s last experiments and fostered of late by Margery’s subtle calumnies, had been fanned to fury by her last round of farewell visits. The death of the warlock himself had little effect in assuaging the new-risen hatred which now was aimed at his living daughter.