“No, no, no, my dear friend!” cried Julius.  “I have steadily sinned against the most vital law of life.”

“Julius,” said Lefevre, standing over him, “my friendship, my love for you may blind me to the enormity of your sin, but I can find it in me to say, in the name of humanity, ’I forgive you all!  Now, rise up and live anew!  Your intelligence, your soul is too rare and admirable to be snuffed out like a guttering candle!’”

“Lefevre,” said Julius, “you are a perfect friend!  But your knowledge of this secret force of Nature, which we have both studied, is not so great as mine.  Let me tell you, then, that this mystical saying, which I once scoffed at, is the profoundest truth:—­

    “’Who loveth life shall lose it all;
    Who seeketh life shall surely fall!’

“There is no remedy for me but death, which (who knows?) may be the mother of new life!”

“It would have been better for you,” said Lefevre, sitting down again with his head in his hands, “better—­if you had never seen Nora.”

“Nay, nay,” cried Julius, sitting up, animate with a fresh impulse of life.  “Better for her, dear, beautiful soul, but not for me!  I have truly lived only since I saw her, and I have the joy of feeling that I have beheld and known Nature’s sole and perfect chrysolite.  But I must be quick, my friend; the dawn will soon be upon us.  There is but one other thing for me to speak of—­my method of taking to myself the force of life.  It is my secret; it is perfectly adapted for professional use, and I wish to give it to you, because you are wise enough in mind, and great enough of soul, to use it for the benefit of mankind.”

“I will not hear you, Julius!” exclaimed Lefevre.  “I am neither wise nor great.  Your perfect secret would be too much for me.  I might be tempted to keep it for my own use.  Come home with me, and apply it well yourself.”

Julius was silent for a space, murmuring only, “I have no time for argument.”  Then his face assumed the white sickness of death, and his dark eyes seemed to grow larger and to burn with a concentrated fire.

“Lefevre!” he panted in amazement, “do you know that you are refusing such a medical and spiritual secret as the world has not known for thousands of years?  A secret that would enable you—­you—­to work cures more wonderful than any that are told of the greatest Eastern Thaumaturge?”

“I have discovered a method,” answered the doctor,—­“an imperfect, clumsy method—­for myself, of transmitting nervous force or ether for curative purposes.  That, for the present, must be enough for me.  I cannot hear your secret, Julius.”

“Lefevre, I beg of you,” pleaded Julius, “take it from me.  I have promised myself, as a last satisfaction, that the secret I have guarded—­it is not altogether mine:  it is an old oriental secret—­that now I would hand it over to you for the good of mankind, that at the last I might say to myself, ’I have, after all, opened my hand liberally to my fellow-men!’ For pity’s sake, Lefevre, don’t deny me that small final satisfaction!”