“My friend, I do not blame you.  You made me happy—­too happy, for I have not been able to bear the contrast between our early married life, so full of joy, and these last days, so desolate, so empty, when you are not yourself.  The life of the heart, like the life of the body, has its functions.  For six years you have been dead to love, to the family, to all that was once our happiness.  I will not speak of our early married days; such joys must cease in the after-time of life, but they ripen into fruits which feed the soul,—­confidence unlimited, the tender habits of affection:  you have torn those treasures from me!  I go in time:  we live together no longer; you hide your thoughts and actions from me.  How is it that you fear me?  Have I ever given you one word, one look, one gesture of reproach?  And yet, you have sold your last pictures, you have sold even the wine in your cellar, you are borrowing money on your property, and have said no word to me.  Ah!  I go from life weary of life.  If you are doing wrong, if you delude yourself in following the unattainable, have I not shown you that my love could share your faults, could walk beside you and be happy, though you led me in the paths of crime?  You loved me too well, —­that was my glory; it is now my death.  Balthazar, my illness has lasted long; it began on the day when here, in this place where I am about to die, you showed me that Science was more to you than Family.  And now the end has come; your wife is dying, and your fortune lost.  Fortune and wife were yours,—­you could do what you willed with your own; but on the day of my death my property goes to my children, and you cannot touch it; what will then become of you?  I am telling you the truth; I owe it to you.  Dying eyes see far; when I am gone will anything outweigh that cursed passion which is now your life?  If you have sacrificed your wife, your children will count but little in the scale; for I must be just and own you loved me above all.  Two millions and six years of toil you have cast into the gulf,—­and what have you found?”

At these words Claes grasped his whitened head in his hands and hid his face.

“Humiliation for yourself, misery for your children,” continued the dying woman.  “You are called in derision ‘Claes the alchemist’; soon it will be ‘Claes the madman.’  For myself, I believe in you.  I know you great and wise; I know your genius:  but to the vulgar eye genius is mania.  Fame is a sun that lights the dead; living, you will be unhappy with the unhappiness of great minds, and your children will be ruined.  I go before I see your fame, which might have brought me consolation for my lost happiness.  Oh, Balthazar! make my death less bitter to me, let me be certain that my children will not want for bread—­ Ah, nothing, nothing, not even you, can calm my fears.”

“I swear,” said Claes, “to—­”