"That is true, madame," said Lorenzo. "But your horoscope shows that you are to marry the man who at this present loves you." "Could you not tell a little lie for my sake?" said she with a smile. "For if the King should believe your forecast----" "Is it not necessary that he should believe in our innocence?" said Cosmo, with a glance full of meaning. "The precautions taken by the King against us have given us reason, during the time we spent in your pretty jail, to suppose that the occult sciences must have been maligned in his ears." "Be quite easy," replied Marie; "I know him, and his doubts are dispelled." "We are innocent," said the old man haughtily. "So much the better; for at this moment the King is having your laboratory searched and your crucibles and phials examined by experts." The brothers looked at each other and smiled. Marie took this smile for the irony of innocence; but it meant: "Poor simpletons! Do you suppose that if we know how to prepare poisons, we do not also know how to conceal them?" "Where are the King's people, then?" asked Cosmo. "In René's house," replied Marie; and the Ruggieri exchanged a glance which conveyed from each to each the same thought, "The Hôtel de Soissons is inviolable!" The King had so completely thrown off his suspicions, that when he went to fetch his son, and Jacob intercepted him to give him a note written by Chapelain, he opened it in the certainty of finding in it what his physician told him concerning his visit to the laboratory, where all that had been discovered bore solely on alchemy. "Will he live happy?" asked the King, showing his infant son to the two alchemists. "This is Cosmo's concern," said Lorenzo, turning to his brother. Cosmo took the child's little hand and studied it carefully. "Monsieur," said Charles IX. to the elder man, "if you are compelled to deny the existence of the spirit to believe that your enterprise is possible, tell me how it is that you can doubt that which constitutes your power. The mind you desire to annihilate is the torch that illumines your search. Ah, ha! Is not that moving while denying the fact of motion?" cried he, and pleased at having hit on this argument, he looked triumphantly at his mistress. "Mind," said Lorenzo Ruggieri, "is the exercise of an internal sense, just as the faculty of seeing various objects and appreciating their form and color is the exercise of our sight. That has nothing to do with what is assumed as to another life. Mind--thought--is a faculty which may cease even during life with the forces that produce it." "You are logical," said the King with surprise. "But alchemy is an atheistical science."