The days wore away slowly. As each one passed, Madame Dimitrius grew more and more uneasy, and more and more her eyes questioned the unresponsive face of her son. Vasho, too, could not forbear gazing with a kind of appealing terror at his master’s composed features and easy demeanour; it was more than devilish, he thought, that a man could comport himself thus indifferently when he had a poor human victim shut up within a laboratory where the two devouring elements of fire and water held the chief sway. However, there was nothing to be done. A figure of stone or iron was not more immovable than Dimitrius when once bent to the resolved execution of a task, no matter how difficult such task might be. Looking at the cold, indomitable expression of the man, one felt that he would care nothing for the loss of a thousand lives, if by such sacrifice he could attain the end in view. But though his outward equanimity remained undisturbed, he was inwardly disquieted and restless. He saw two alternatives to his possible success. His victim might die,--in which case her body would crumble to ashes in the process to which it was being subjected,--or she might lose her senses. Death would be kinder than the latter fate, but he was powerless to determine either. And even at the back of his mind there lurked a dim suggestion of some other result which he could not formulate or reckon with. The longest waiting must have an end, but never to his thought did a longer period of time stretch itself out between the evening of the twentieth of June and that of the twenty-fourth, Midsummer Day. The weather remained perfect; intensely warm, bright and still. Not a cloud crossed the burning blue of the daylight, and at evening, the young moon, slightly broadening from a slender sickle to the curve of a coracle boat floating whitely in the deep ether, shed fairy silver over the lake and the Alpine snows above it. During these days, many people of note and scientific distinction called at the Château Fragonard,--Féodor Dimitrius was a personage to be reckoned with in many departments of knowledge, and his exquisite gardens afforded coolness and shade to those wanderers from various lands who were touring Switzerland in search of health and change of scene. Near neighbours and acquaintances also came and went, but such is the generally vague attitude of mind assumed by ordinary folk to other than themselves, that scarcely any among the few who had met Diana and accepted her as a chance visitor to Madame Dimitrius, now remembered her, except the Baron and Baroness de Rousillon, who still kept up a slight show of interest as to her whereabouts, though their questions were lightly evaded and never fully answered. Professor Chauvet, irritated and unhappy at receiving no news whatever of the woman for whom he had conceived a singular but sincere affection, had taken it into his head to go suddenly to Paris, to see after his house