“I shall not be here in the morning; you must come to-night.” This repeated answer seemed final and decisive. In the course of an ordinary affair Arnbush would have ordered the speaker to remain and await his arrival in the morning. But the voice seemed one not easily to be ordered. And Arnbush was still hot with the moving impulses of his affair. There was no mood for sleep on him, although the night was advanced. And he determined to go. He got his coat and hat and descended into the street. A few minutes brought him to the number. The building, gaunt with its lightless windows, was abandoned. But the door to the dark entrance opened as he approached. “We shall have to walk up,” a voice said. “It is not far.” Arnbush could not see the man; but he recognized the voice, and he went in. It seemed a long journey up the stairs. Finally they came into a room lighted dimly, above a table, with a gas jet. The room was fitted with all the devices of a chemist’s trade; there was the faint, pungent odor of such a place about it. Two tall windows looked out above the city, and there was a chair and a stool beside the table. The chemist was now visible to Arnbush: a tall, stooped figure in a sort of smock; a big, nearly naked head, bulging above the brows and fringed with straw-colored hair; a pasty face, livid and unhealthy; and thick, myopic glasses that reduced the eyes behind them. The chemist took the stool behind the table and indicated the chair before it for his guest. Arnbush was fatigued with the long climb, and he at once sat down. The chemist came directly to the point; he made no disquisition on his wealthy patron, the hour, or the affair. “I have discovered the thing you are seeking,” he said. “I will show it to you.” He took a little glass tube from a rack before him and held it under the light. It was partly filled with a thick, viscous, golden-colored stuff. “That is circine,” he said. “It is the element of virtue in all distillations. In alcohol,” he continued, “one finds it imperfectly produced. This sample I am showing you is pure.” He rose, got a glass, filled it halfway with water from a spigot, added a drop of the fluid from the tube and handed it to Arnbush. “Drink that,” he said. The golden-colored essence had disappeared completely into the water, making a rich amber liquid, and the man thought that he was about to taste something peculiar or unpleasant. He got the staggering shake-up of his life. At the first touch of the liquid to his tongue, the man paused, removed the glass, and sat back in his chair, looking in wonder at the chemist. He had tasted something heavenly! The aroma of a soft, aged, velvety liquor was in his mouth; a liquor beyond the product of any human distillation; the liquor that one has dreamed of, forgotten in some ancient cask, bedded down in cobwebs in a warehouse, or hidden by one’s father through a lifetime. The man was too shaken to be coherent. He began to stutter.