“All is over!” cried Marguerite, “the time has come.”

She sent for her father, and walked up and down the parlor with hasty steps, talking to herself:—­

“A hundred thousand francs!” she cried.  “I must find them, or see my father in prison.  What am I to do?”

Balthazar did not come.  Weary of waiting for him, Marguerite went up to the laboratory.  As she entered she saw him in the middle of an immense, brilliantly-lighted room, filled with machinery and dusty glass vessels:  here and there were books, and tables encumbered with specimens and products ticketed and numbered.  On all sides the disorder of scientific pursuits contrasted strongly with Flemish habits.  This litter of retorts and vaporizers, metals, fantastically colored crystals, specimens hooked upon the walls or lying on the furnaces, surrounded the central figure of Balthazar Claes, without a coat, his arms bare like those of a workman, his breast exposed, and showing the white hair which covered it.  His eyes were gazing with horrible fixity at a pneumatic trough.  The receiver of this instrument was covered with a lens made of double convex glasses, the space between the glasses being filled with alchohol, which focussed the light coming through one of the compartments of the rose-window of the garret.  The shelf of the receiver communicated with the wire of an immense galvanic battery.  Lemulquinier, busy at the moment in moving the pedestal of the machine, which was placed on a movable axle so as to keep the lens in a perpendicular direction to the rays of the sun, turned round, his face black with dust, and called out,—­

“Ha! mademoiselle, don’t come in.”

The aspect of her father, half-kneeling beside the instrument, and receiving the full strength of the sunlight upon his head, the protuberances of his skull, its scanty hairs resembling threads of silver, his face contracted by the agonies of expectation, the strangeness of the objects that surrounded him, the obscurity of parts of the vast garret from which fantastic engines seemed about to spring, all contributed to startle Marguerite, who said to herself, in terror,—­

“He is mad!”

Then she went up to him and whispered in his ear, “Send away Lemulquinier.”

“No, no, my child; I want him:  I am in the midst of an experiment no one has yet thought of.  For the last three days we have been watching for every ray of sun.  I now have the means of submitting metals, in a complete vacuum, to concentrated solar fires and to electric currents.  At this very moment the most powerful action a chemist can employ is about to show results which I alone—­”

“My father, instead of vaporizing metals you should employ them in paying your notes of hand—­”

“Wait, wait!”

“Monsieur Merkstus has been here, father; and he must have ten thousand francs by four o’clock.”

“Yes, yes, presently.  True, I did sign a little note which is payable this month.  I felt sure I should have found the Absolute.  Good God!  If I could only have a July sun the experiment would be successful.”