Chick smiled wanly.  “May I ask you:  what it is that has just flared up within me?  I am weak, anaemic, fallen to pieces; my muscles have lost the power to function, my blood runs cold, I have been more than two feet over the border.  And yet—­a few drinks of brandy, of stimulants, and you have drawn me back, my heart beats strongly, for an hour.  By means of drugs you have infused a new life—­which of course is the old—­and driven the material components of my body into correlation.  You are successful for a time; so long as nature is with you; but all the while you are held aghast by the knowledge that the least flaw, the least disarrangement, and you are beaten.

“It is your business to hold this life or what you may.  When it has gone your structures, your anatomy, your wonderful human machine is worthless.  Where has it come from?  Where has it gone?  I have drunk four glasses of brandy; I have a lease of four short hours.  Ordinarily it would bring reaction; it is poison, to be sure; but it is driving back my spirit, giving me life and strength enough to tell my story—­in the morning I shall be no more.  By sequence I am a dead man already.  Four glasses of brandy; they are speaking.  Whence comes this affinity of substance and of shadow?”

We all of us listened, the doctor most of all.  “Go on,” he said.

“Can’t you see?” repeated Watson.  “There is affinity between substance and shadow; and therefore your spirit or shadow or what you will is concrete, is in itself a substance.  It is material just as much as you are.  Because you do not see it is no proof that it is not substance.  That pot palm yonder does not see you; it is not blessed with eyes.”

The doctor looked at Watson; he spoke gently.

“This is very old stuff, my boy, out of your abstract philosophy.  No man knows the secret of life.  Not even yourself.”

The light in Watson’s eyes grew brighter, he straightened; he began slipping the ring from his finger.

“No,” he answered.  “I don’t.  I have tried and it was like playing with lightning.  I sought for life and it is giving me death.  But there is one man living who has found it.”

“And this man?”

“Is Dr. Holcomb!”

We all of us started.  We had every one given the doctor up as dead.  The very presence of Watson was tragedy.  We did not doubt that he had been through some terrible experience.  There are things in the world that may not be unriddled.  Some power, some sinister thing was reaching for his vitality.  What did he know about the professor?  Dr. Holcomb had been a long time dead.

“Gentlemen.  You must hear my story; I haven’t long to tell it.  However, before I start here is a proof for a beginning.”

He tossed the ring upon the table.

It was Hobart who picked it up.  A beautiful stone, like a sapphire; blue but uncut and of a strange pellucid transparency—­a jewel undoubtedly; but of a kind we have never seen.  We all of us examined it, and were all, I am afraid, a bit disappointed.  It was a stone and nothing else.