breathing acrid and poisonous vapours, seeking to extort from Nature her yet undiscovered secrets,—­the Philosophers Stone, and the Elixir of Life.  He saw him turn for a little from his strange and deadly experiments, and venture forth to show his blanched and worn face among the throngs of men; but even there he still pursued his anxious quest of life in the midst of death.  He saw him wander up and down, in and out, among the evening crowd, delighting in contact with such of his fellow-creatures as had health and youth, and seeking, seeking—­he knew not what.  From this phantasmagoria he dozed off into the dark plains of sleep; but even there the terribly blanched and emaciated face was with him, bending wistful worn eyes upon him and melting him to pity.  And still again the vision of the streets would arise about the face, and the sleeper would be aware of the man to whom the face belonged walking quickly and sinuously, seeking and enjoying contact with the throng, and strangely causing many to resent his touch as if they had been pricked or stung, and yet urged onward in some further quest,—­an anxious quest it sometimes resolved itself into for Julius, who ever evaded him.

Thus his brain laboured through the dead hours of the night, viewing and reviewing these scenes and figures, to extract a meaning from them; but he was no nearer the heart of the mystery when the morning broke and he was waked by the shrill chatter of the sparrows.  The day, however, brought an event which shed a lurid light upon the Courtney difficulty, and revealed a vital connection between facts which Lefevre had not guessed were related.

Chapter V.

The Remarkable Case of Lady Mary Fane.

It was the kind of day that is called seasonable.  If the sun had been obscured, the air would have been felt to be wintry; but the sunshine was full and warm, and so the world rejoiced, and declared it was a perfectly lovely May day,—­just as a man who is charmed with the smiles and beauty of a woman, thinks her complete though she may have a heart of ice.  Lefevre, as he went his hospital round that afternoon, found his patients revelling in the sunlight like flies.  He himself was in excellent spirits, and he said a cheery or facetious word here and there as he passed, which gave infinite delight to the thin and bloodless atomies under his care; for a joke from so serious and awful a being as the doctor is to a desponding patient better than all the drugs of the pharmacopoeia:  it is as exquisite and sustaining as a divine text of promise to a religious enthusiast.

Dr Lefevre was thus passing round his female ward, with a train of attentive students at his heels, when the door was swung open and two attendants entered, bearing a stretcher between them, and accompanied by the house-physician and a policeman.

“What is this?” asked Lefevre, with a touch of severity; for it was irregular to intrude a fresh case into a ward while the physician was going his round.