Waterbury evening Democrat., 1891-04-01

account you're sent to the wall.
 "And you're tired of being sent to tho wall?''
 Lucia Maynard sighed. s'I'm tired of not living" 'And you think that not being fash. ionable is not living?' ''Oh, no. But I think not knowing certain people-refned, attractive peo- ple-is almost like death itself"
 Thorndyke dropped his head for a moment and pulled at his gray mus tache. ''Well, after all, is death so horrible?''
 "Death?'' she echoed, with a sudden
 ierceness of mien. ''Oh, think it is frightfull do so hate the idea of dy. ingl Don't you?" And as she leaned toward him, with the light near lamp sending out the clear-cut grace and pal. Tor of her neck, throat and chin, it oc- cured to him that she was extremely beautiful.
 Not unnaturally he thought of the sealed manuscript which of late he had delivered to her husband. And then, while remembering this, he also recol- lected the elixir (that 'tinfernal non. sense" as he had long ago got to call it) which might very probably have formed the gist and pith of Egbert Maynard's bequest.
 ''If you so hate the doom of dying" he said, inwardly stirred by the idea of his own boldness and imprudence, ''you might perhaps have read with interest the farewell lines which Sylvan's father left him and which I delivered to him on his twenty-ifth birthday. Or, it may be, your husband did not show you what gave him. If that is true. then T."
 "Yes, yes," she broke in, with an eagerness that was violence. "He did show me that letter-that singular let ter. IT have been thinking of it ever since; can't keep my mind from dwell ing on it. Did you not consider it most amazing message?'
 ''I might judge better" replied Thorn dyke, eff I could know what it was like"
 "Why, didn't you know?'' she fall tered. "I thought you were his inti- mate friend"
 'I was-and at one time his very in- timate friend. Though he never told me what was inside that envelope, I can guess its contents" He continued speaking for some time and ended with these words: "Of course it was a wild dream of Egbert Maynard's. Now and then the finest human intellects are be- guiled just in this way" He saw her face fall, and then watched her as she nervously bit her lips. "You speak from your own experience as a chem ist," she said, and the ring of disap- pointment in her voice was plain to him as would have been her tears if shed from the troubled glooms of her eyes.
 ''I'm not chemist" Thorndyke hastened to reply; "I'm physician-or was."
 Her looks frightened again. 'Then you do not speak with any real cer. tainty, after all.''
 "Ah, my dear lady! As if one could not be sure we had left the elixir of life and the philosophers stone both very far indeed behind!'
 "But this Equefaction of electricity which Sylvan's dead father describes for which he offers the very formula ot preparation-wouldy you assert Mat to be impossible?"
 'I would-yes."
 Lucia unused for moment, and then gave her head so earnest a negative shake that its f1ossy brown loops of hair emitted flashes in the lamplight like those from polished mahogany.
 'But you are stating, in so many words," she exclaimed, ''that Egbert ! Maynard was a madman."
 ''There are many sane madmen in the world.''
 She struck the edge of her chair im- patiently with one clenched hand. |
 "That is no answer. So many things no moro wonderful than his assumed invention GCehappened- To concentrate the vital principle of all existence-I see nothing more extraordinary in it than | to achieve the telegraph, the telephone. | At least, I can't understand why it should be scoffed at before it is tried"
 Thorndyl1e laughed. q don't scoff at it, he said. "But 1t is like having some one tell you that he had construct ed an apparatus by means of which you could see round corner" |
 'I can imagine such an apparatus be- ing constructed"
 ''One can imagine the miraculous" | conceded Thorndyke, with smile of 1 skeptic amusement gleaming between his gray-bearded lips. 'But I don't | suppose that your husband will object to testing the truth or falsity of what his father so firmly believed"
 Lucia once more shook her head, and | this time with forlorn motion. "Ob- ject! You don't know him. He's al- ready afraid of that prescription as though it were cobra"
 "Afraid of it?"
 "Assuredly."
 "And why?" quoried Thorndyke, with a sudden recollection of how his dead friends dead wife had once de- ported herself.
 ''Why?" Lucia repeated. She made quick little gesture of evaporation and disgust. "He's a tremendously relig> ious man, this husband of mine. Didn't you know that? Haven't you seen it2 I think that from some sacred sense of fil- ial respecthe would never destroy those papers. But he's already locked them