The man had been a failure in his day, a scholar, a student, a searcher after great secrets, a wanderer in the labyrinths of higher thought.  He had been a failure and had starved, as failures must, in order that vulgar success may fatten and grow healthy.  He had outlived the few that had been dear to him, he had outlived the power to feed on thought, he had outlived generations of men, and cycles of changes, and yet there had been life left in the huge gaunt limbs and sight in the sunken eyes.  Then he had outlived pride itself, and the ancient scholar had begged his bread.  In his hundredth year he had leaned for rest against Unorna’s door, and she had taken him in and cared for him, and since that time she had preserved his life.  For his history was known in the ancient city, and it was said that he had possessed great wisdom in his day.  Unorna knew that this wisdom could be hers if she could keep alive the spark of life, and that she could employ his own learning to that end.  Already she had much experience of her powers, and knew that if she once had the mastery of the old man’s free will he must obey her fatally and unresistingly.  Then she conceived the idea of embalming, as it were, the living being, in a perpetual hypnotic lethargy, from whence she recalled him from time to time to an intermediate state, in which she caused him to do mechanically all those things which she judged necessary to prolong life.

Seeing her success from the first, she had begun to fancy that the present condition of things might be made to continue indefinitely.  Since death was to-day no nearer than it had been seven years ago, there was no reason why it might not be guarded against during seven years more, and if during seven, why not during ten, twenty, fifty?  She had for a helper a physician of consummate practical skill—­a man whose interest in the result of the trial was, if anything, more keen than her own; a friend, above all, whom she believed she might trust, and who appeared to trust her.

But in the course of their great experiment they had together made rules by which they had mutually agreed to be bound.  They had of late determined that the old man must not be disturbed in his profound rest by any question tending to cause a state of mental activity.  The test of a very fine instrument had proved that the shortest interval of positive lucidity was followed by a slight but distinctly perceptible rise of temperature in the body, and this could mean only a waste of the precious tissues they were so carefully preserving.  They hoped and believed that the grand crisis was at hand, and that, if the body did not now lose strength and vitality for a considerable time, both would slowly though surely increase, in consequence of the means they were using to instill new blood into the system.  But the period was supreme, and to interfere in any way with the progress of the experiment was to run a risk of which the whole extent could only be realised by Unorna and her companion.