The terrible scene had seemed so real, it could not be a dream, he thought; a desire to throw light upon the puzzle excited him; he managed to reach the door, opened it after many efforts, and stood on the threshold of his salon.  There they were—­his dear pictures, his statues, his Florentine bronzes, his porcelain; the sight of them revived him.  The old collector walked in his dressing-gown along the narrow spaces between the credence-tables and the sideboards that lined the wall; his feet bare, his head on fire.  His first glance of ownership told him that everything was there; he turned to go back to bed again, when he noticed that a Greuze portrait looked out of the frame that had held Sebastian del Piombo’s Templar.  Suspicion flashed across his brain, making his dark thoughts apparent to him, as a flash of lightning marks the outlines of the cloud-bars on a stormy sky.  He looked round for the eight capital pictures of the collection; each one of them was replaced by another.  A dark film suddenly overspread his eyes; his strength failed him; he fell fainting upon the polished floor.

So heavy was the swoon, that for two hours he lay as he fell, till Schmucke awoke and went to see his friend, and found him lying unconscious in the salon.  With endless pains Schmucke raised the half-dead body and laid it on the bed; but when he came to question the death-stricken man, and saw the look in the dull eyes and heard the vague, inarticulate words, the good German, so far from losing his head, rose to the very heroism of friendship.  Man and child as he was, with the pressure of despair came the inspiration of a mother’s tenderness, a woman’s love.  He warmed towels (he found towels!), he wrapped them about Pons’ hands, he laid them over the pit of the stomach; he took the cold, moist forehead in his hands, he summoned back life with a might of will worthy of Apollonius of Tyana, laying kisses on his friend’s eyelids like some Mary bending over the dead Christ, in a pieta carved in bas-relief by some great Italian sculptor.  The divine effort, the outpouring of one life into another, the work of mother and of lover, was crowned with success.  In half an hour the warmth revived Pons; he became himself again, the hues of life returned to his eyes, suspended faculties gradually resumed their play under the influence of artificial heat; Schmucke gave him balm-water with a little wine in it; the spirit of life spread through the body; intelligence lighted up the forehead so short a while ago insensible as a stone; and Pons knew that he had been brought back to life, by what sacred devotion, what might of friendship!

“But for you, I should die,” he said, and as he spoke he felt the good German’s tears falling on his face.  Schmucke was laughing and crying at once.

Poor Schmucke! he had waited for those words with a frenzy of hope as costly as the frenzy of despair; and now his strength utterly failed him, he collapsed like a rent balloon.  It was his turn to fall; he sank into the easy-chair, clasped his hands, and thanked God in fervent prayer.  For him a miracle had just been wrought.  He put no belief in the efficacy of the prayer of his deeds; the miracle had been wrought by God in direct answer to his cry.  And yet that miracle was a natural effect, such as medical science often records.