decking the room and the couch on which the dead man lay. At a

sign from Don Juan all his people stopped, dumfounded and
trembling.

"Leave me alone here," he said, and his voice was changed, "and
do not return until I leave the room."

When the footsteps of the old servitor, who was the last to go,
echoed but faintly along the paved gallery, Don Juan hastily

locked the door, and sure that he was quite alone, "Let us try,"
he said to himself.

Bartolommeo's body was stretched on a long table. The embalmers
had laid a sheet over it, to hide from all eyes the dreadful

spectacle of a corpse so wasted and shrunken that it seemed like
a skeleton, and only the face was uncovered. This mummy-like

figure lay in the middle of the room. The limp clinging linen
lent itself to the outlines it shrouded--so sharp, bony, and

thin. Large violet patches had already begun to spread over the
face; the embalmers' work had not been finished too soon.

Don Juan, strong as he was in his scepticism, felt a tremor as he
opened the magic crystal flask. When he stood over that face, he

was trembling so violently, that he was actually obliged to wait
for a moment. But Don Juan had acquired an early familiarity with

evil; his morals had been corrupted by a licentious court, a
reflection worthy of the Duke of Urbino crossed his mind, and it

was a keen sense of curiosity that goaded him into boldness. The
devil himself might have whispered the words that were echoing

through his brain, Moisten one of the eyes with the liquid! He
took up a linen cloth, moistened it sparingly with the precious

fluid, and passed it lightly over the right eyelid of the corpse.
The eye unclosed. . . .

"Aha!" said Don Juan. He gripped the flask tightly, as we clutch
in dreams the branch from which we hang suspended over a

precipice.
For the eye was full of life. It was a young child's eye set in a

death's head; the light quivered in the depths of its youthful
liquid brightness. Shaded by the long dark lashes, it sparkled

like the strange lights that travelers see in lonely places in
winter nights. The eye seemed as if it would fain dart fire at

Don Juan; he saw it thinking, upbraiding, condemning, uttering
accusations, threatening doom; it cried aloud, and gnashed upon

him. All anguish that shakes human souls was gathered there;
supplications the most tender, the wrath of kings, the love in a

girl's heart pleading with the headsman; then, and after all
these, the deeply searching glance a man turns on his fellows as

he mounts the last step of the scaffold. Life so dilated in this
fragment of life that Don Juan shrank back; he walked up and down

the room, he dared not meet that gaze, but he saw nothing else.
The ceiling and the hangings, the whole room was sown with living

points of fire and intelligence. Everywhere those gleaming eyes
haunted him.

"He might very likely have lived another hundred years!" he cried
involuntarily. Some diabolical influence had drawn him to his

father, and again he gazed at that luminous spark. The eyelid
closed and opened again abruptly; it was like a woman's sign of

assent. It was an intelligentmovement. If a voice had cried
"Yes!" Don Juan could not have been more startled.

"What is to be done?" he thought.
He nerved himself to try to close the white eyelid. In vain.

"Kill it? That would perhaps be parricide," he debated with
himself.

"Yes," the eye said, with a strange sardonic quiver of the lid.
"Aha!" said Don Juan to himself, "here is witchcraft at work!"

And he went closer to crush the thing. A great tear trickled over
the hollow cheeks, and fell on Don Juan's hand.

"It is scalding!" he cried. He sat down. The struggle exhausted
him; it was as if, like Jacob of old, he was wrestling with an

angel.
At last he rose. "So long as there is no blood----" he muttered.

Then, summoning all the courage needed for a coward's crime, he
extinguished the eye, pressing it with the linen cloth, turning

his head away. A terrible groan startled him. It was the poor
poodle, who died with a long-drawn howl.

"Could the brute have been in the secret?" thought Don Juan,
looking down at the faithful creature.

Don Juan Belvidero was looked upon as a dutiful son. He reared a
white marblemonument on his father's tomb, and employed the

greatest sculptors of the time upon it. He did not recover
perfect ease of mind till the day when his father knelt in marble

before Religion, and the heavy weight of the stone had sealed the
mouth of the grave in which he had laid the one feeling of

remorse that sometimes flitted through his soul in moments of
physical weariness.

He had drawn up a list of the wealth heaped up by the old
merchant in the East, and he became a miser: had he not to

provide for a second lifetime? His views of life were the more
profound and penetrating; he grasped its significance, as a

whole, the better, because he saw it across a grave. All men, all
things, he analyzed once and for all; he summed up the Past,

represented by its records; the Present in the law, its
crystallized form; the Future, revealed by religion. He took

spirit and matter, and flung them into his crucible, and found--
Nothing. Thenceforward he became DON JUAN.

At the outset of his life, in the prime of youth and the beauty
of youth, he knew the illusions of life for what they were; he

despised the world, and made the utmost of the world. His
felicity could not have been of the bourgeois kind, rejoicing in

periodically recurrent bouilli, in the comforts of a warming-pan,
a lamp of a night, and a new pair of slippers once a quarter.

Nay, rather he seized upon existence as a monkey snatches a nut,
and after no long toying with it, proceeds deftly to strip off

the mere husks to reach the savory kernel within.
Poetry and the sublime transports of passion scarcely reached

ankle-depth with him now. He in nowise fell into the error of
strong natures who flatter themselves now and again that little

souls will believe in a great soul, and are willing to barter
their own lofty thoughts of the future for the small change of

our life-annuity ideas. He, even as they, had he chosen, might
well have walked with his feet on the earth and his head in the

skies; but he liked better to sit on earth, to wither the soft,
fresh, fragrant lips of a woman with kisses, for like Death, he

devoured everything without scruple as he passed; he would have
full fruition; he was an Oriental lover, seeking prolonged

pleasures easily obtained. He sought nothing but a woman in
women, and cultivated cynicism, until it became with him a habit

of mind. When his mistress, from the couch on which she lay,
soared and was lost in regions of ecstatic bliss, Don Juan

followed suit, earnest, expansive, serious as any German student.
But he said I, while she, in the transports of intoxication, said

We. He understood to admiration the art of abandoning himself to
the influence of a woman; he was always clever enough to make her

believe that he trembled like some boy fresh from college before
his first partner at a dance, when he asks her, "Do you like

dancing?" But, no less, he could be terrible at need, could
unsheathe a formidable sword and make short work of Commandants.

Banter lurked beneath his simplicity, mocking laughter behind his
tears--for he had tears at need, like any woman nowadays who says

to her husband, "Give me a carriage, or I shall go into a
consumption."

For the merchant the world is a bale of goods or a mass of
circulating bills; for most young men it is a woman, and for a

woman here and there it is a man; for a certain order of mind it
is a salon, a coterie, a quarter of the town, or some single