all its rooms. Pictures, furniture, carpets, hangings, carvings--all
were swept clean away. Marguerite wept as she looked about her, and
forgave her father. She went downstairs to await his coming. How he must
have suffered in this bare house! Fear filled her heart. Had his reason
failed him? Should she see him enter--a tottering and enfeebled old man,
broken by the sufferings which he had borne so proudly for science? As
she waited, the past rose before her eyes--the long past of struggle
against their enemy, the Absolute; the long past, when she was a child,
and her mother had been now so joyous and now so sorrowful.

But she did not realise the calamity of her father's tragedy--a tragedy
at once sublime and miserable. To the people of Douai he was not a
scientific genius wrestling with Nature for her hidden mysteries, but a
wicked old spendthrift, greedy like a miser for the Philosopher's Stone.
Everybody in Douai, from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie to the
people, knew all about old Claes, "the alchemist." His home was called
the "Devil's House." People pointed at him, shouted after him in the
street. Lemulquinier said that these were murmurs of applause for
genius.

It happened that on this morning of Marguerite's return, Balthazar and
Lemulquinier sat down on a bench in the Place Saint-Jacques to rest in
the sun. Some children passing to school saw the two old men, talked
about them, laughed together, and presently approached. One of them, who
carried a basket, and was eating a piece of bread and butter, said to
Lemulquinier: "Is it true you make diamonds and pearls?"

Lemulquinier patted the urchin's cheek.

"Yes, little fellow, it is true," he said. "Stick to your books, get