Aselzion, standing in the full light of the glittering Cross and Star, looked upon him with a smile.

“I also carry the burden—­if burden you must call it—­of seventy years!” he said—­“But years are nothing to me—­they should be nothing to you.  Who asked you to count them or to consider them?  In the world of wild Nature, time is measured by seasons only—­the bird does not know how old it is—­the rose-tree does not count its birthdays!  You, whom I know to be a brave man and patient student, have lived the usual life of men in the world—­you are wedded to a Woman who has never cared to understand the deeper side of your nature, and who is now far older than you, though in actual years younger,—­you have children who look upon you as their banker merely and who, while feigning affection, really wait for your death with eagerness in order to possess your fortune.  You might as well have never had those children!—­I know all this as you yourself know it—­ I also know that through the word-impressions and influence of so-called ‘friends’ who wish to persuade you of your age, the disintegrating process has begun,—­but this can be arrested.  You yourself can arrest it!—­the dream of Faust is no fallacy!—­only that the renewal of youth is not the work of magic evil, but of natural good.  If you would be young, leave the world as you have known it and begin it anew,—­leave wife, children, friends, all that hang like fungi upon an oak, rotting its trunk and sapping its strength without imparting any new form of vitality.  Live again—­ love again!”

“I!”—­and he who was thus spoken to threw back his cowl, showing a face wan and deeply wrinkled, yet striking in its fine intellectuality of feature—­“I!—­with these white hairs!  You jest with me, Aselzion!”

“I never jest!”—­replied Aselzion—­“I leave jesting to the fools who prate of life without comprehending its first beginnings.  I do not jest with you—­put me to the proof!  Obey my rules here but for six months and you shall pass out of these walls with every force in your body and spirit renewed in youth and vitality!  But Yourself must work the miracle,—­which, after all, is no miracle!  Yourself must build Yourself!—­as everyone is bound to do who would make the fullest living out of life.  If you hesitate,—­if you draw back,—­if you turn with one foolish regret or morbid thought to your past mistakes in life which are past—­to her, your wife, a wife in name but never in soul,—­to your children, born of animal instinct but not of spiritual deep love,—­to those your ‘friends’ who count up your years as though they were crimes,—­you check the work of re-invigoration, and you stultify the forces of renewal.  You must choose—­and the choice must be voluntary and deliberate,—­for no man becomes aged and effete without his own intention and inclination to that end,—­and equally, no man retains or renews his youth without a similar intention and inclination.  Take two days to consider—­and then tell me your mind.”