She began by saying she had not forgotten that, according to his dead father the saints had endowed her with a very limited intelligence, but that she knew enough to be certain that it could be neither wise, nor right for a man who had been blessed with such a fine son, to be indifferent to his treasure and indeed to estrange it.

The extraordinary man looked at her with his sad eyes and answered thoughtfully:  “I demand nothing from the boy be cause I have no other idea than to give him all I have and am.  For his benefit I am seeking something higher than the world has yet known, and I shall find it.”

The lofty words silenced Frau Schimmel, but she thought to herself:  “With my few brains I am yet wiser than you.  A heartfelt, willing kiss from your child would make you happier than all the learning that you make so much fuss about, and a caress or a spank from you—­each at the proper time—­would do little Zeno more good than all the world-improving discoveries in search of which you embitter your days and nights.”

One beautiful afternoon in June on her return from the graveyard, whither she regularly took the boy, and where she herself carefully tended the white roses on Bianca’s grave, she found the doctor stretched on the sofa, instead of being in the laboratory as usual, and as he sighed heavily when she entered, she asked him respectfully what it was that oppressed him.

At first he shook his head as if he wished to be left alone, but when she, in spite of this, remained and he noticed that her gray eyes were full of tears, he suddenly remembered that by the side of his mother’s coffin, and more recently at Bianca’s death-bed they had wept together, then his full heart overflowed, and gasping and shaken by his cough he burst forth with:  “It will soon be over—­I feel it within me, and yet I am no nearer to the goal.  All the elements of nature I have called to my aid—­all the spirits ’twixt Heaven and Earth over whom necromancy has any power have I made subject to my will and have commanded them to help me—­to what end?  There stands the elixir and is hardly more valuable than the small beer with which the servant down-stairs quenches his thirst, indeed it is less useful for who derives any benefit from it?  I shall quit this world an unhappy man who has wasted his life and talents in untold efforts from his school-days until now—­and yet, if the spirit would only reveal to me the missing substance which should give to this liquid in my hand the power that it once possessed, gladly would I sacrifice twenty lives!  Oh! you faithful old soul, you can never understand it, I know.  But this world, where lying and deceit flourish, would be changed into a Paradise, and it would be an Ueberhell whom mankind would have to thank for the great blessing.  And now—­now!”

Here he buried his face in his hands like one in despair.  Frau Schimmel regarded the sorrowful man with deep sympathy, and as it was in her nature to try and comfort those who wept rather than to join in their lamentations, she cast about her for something that would console him.