“But that's her death-warrant,” cried John, quickly. “It's her life-warrant. The fatal thing we've been warned against all these years is no longer fatal. She can move her head easily, painlessly. Don't you see?” The weak old eyes were wet. “My God!” said John. His breath came fast, and he clapped his great hand on the other's lean shoulders. “But that means--great God in heaven!”.--his voice shook--“what may it not mean?” “It may mean everything,” said Sir Oliver. From time to time throughout Stella's life the great magicians of science had entered the sea-chamber and departed thence, shaking sad and certain heads. With proper care, they said, Stellamaris might live--might live, indeed, until her hair turned white and her young cheeks shrivelled with age; but of leaving that bed by the window and going forth into the outer world there was no hope or question. Still, Nature, the inscrutable, the whimsical, might be cozened by treatment into working a miracle. At any rate, no harm would be done by trying, and her guardians would have the consoling assurance that nothing had been left undone. They prescribed after their high knowledge, and pocketed their high fees, and went their way. Dr. Ransome, Stella's lifelong doctor and worshipper, carried out each great magician's orders, and, as prophesied, nothing ever happened either for good or harm. But, six months ago, a greater magician than all, one Wilhelm von Pfeiler of Vienna, who by working miracles on his own account with newly discovered and stupendous forces had begun to startle scientific Europe, happened to be in England, and was summoned to the sea-chamber. He was a dark, silky-bearded man in whose eyes brooded perpetual melancholy. He, too, shook his head and said “Perhaps.” Ransome, who had seized with high hopes on the wandering magician, found him vastly depressing. His “Perhaps” was more mournfully hopeless than the others' “No.” He spoke little, for he knew no English, and Ransome's German, like that of Stella's household, was scanty; but Ransome understood him to croak platitudes about time and youth and growth and nature being factors in the case. As to his newly discovered treatment, well, it might have some effect; he was certain of nothing; as yet no sure deductions could be drawn from his experiments; everything concerning the application of these new forces was at the empirical stage. So profound a melancholy rang in his utterances that he left Lady Blount weeping bitterly, and convinced that he had passed death-sentence on their beloved being. Then a near-sighted, taciturn young man, a budding magician who had sat at Von Pfeiler's feet in Vienna, came down from London with apparatus worth a hundred times its weight in gold. And nothing happened or seemed about to happen. Stella called him the gnome.