“Will he live a happy man?” asked the king, presenting his son to the two alchemists.

“That is a question which concerns Cosmo,” replied Lorenzo, signing his brother.

Cosmo took the tiny hand of the child, and examined it carefully.

“Monsieur,” said Charles IX. to the old man, “if you find it necessary to deny the existence of the soul in order to believe in the possibility of your enterprise, will you explain to my why you should doubt what your power does?  Thought, which you seek to nullify, is the certainty, the torch which lights your researches.  Ha! ha! is not that the motion of a spirit within you, while you deny such motion?” cried the king, pleased with his argument, and looking triumphantly at his mistress.

“Thought,” replied Lorenzo Ruggiero, “is the exercise of an inward sense; just as the faculty of seeing several objects and noticing their size and color is an effect of sight.  It has no connection with what people choose to call another life.  Thought is a faculty which ceases, with the forces which produced it, when we cease to breathe.”

“You are logical,” said the king, surprised.  “But alchemy must therefore be an atheistical science.’

“A materialist science, sire, which is a very different thing.  Materialism is the outcome of Indian doctrines, transmitted through the mysteries of Isis to Chaldea and Egypt, and brought to Greece by Pythagoras, one of the demigods of humanity.  His doctrine of re-incarnation is the mathematics of materialism, the vital law of its phases.  To each of the different creations which form the terrestrial creation belongs the power of retarding the movement which sweeps on the rest.”

“Alchemy is the science of sciences!” cried Charles IX., enthusiastically.  “I want to see you at work.”

“Whenever it pleases you, sire; you cannot be more interested than Madame the Queen-mother.”

“Ah! so this is why she cares for you?” exclaimed the king.

“The house of Medici has secretly protected our Search for more than a century.”

“Sire,” said Cosmo, “this child will live nearly a hundred years; he will have trials; nevertheless, he will be happy and honored, because he has in his veins the blood of the Valois.”

“I will go and see you in your laboratory, messieurs,” said the king, his good-humor quite restored.  “You may now go.”

The brothers bowed to Marie and to the king and then withdrew.  They went down the steps of the portico gravely, without looking or speaking to each other; neither did they turn their faces to the windows as they crossed the courtyard, feeling sure that the king’s eye watched them.  But as they passed sideways out of the gate into the street they looked back and saw Charles IX. gazing after them from a window.  When the alchemist and the astrologer were safely in the rue de l’Autruche, they cast their eyes before and behind them, to see if they were followed or overheard; then they continued their way to the moat of the Louvre without uttering a word.  Once there, however, feeling themselves securely alone, Lorenzo said to Cosmo, in the Tuscan Italian of that day:—­