unless she laid her hand upon his waxen forehead and bid him feel and
hear, he would be as unconscious as the dead. She returned to his side
and gazed into his placid face. Strange faculties were asleep in that
ancient brain, and strange wisdom was stored there, gathered from
many sources long ago, and treasured unconsciously by the memory to be
recalled at her command.

The man had been a failure in his day, a scholar, a student, a searcher
after great secrets, a wanderer in the labyrinths of higher thought.
He had been a failure and had starved, as failures must, in order that
vulgar success may fatten and grow healthy. He had outlived the few that
had been dear to him, he had outlived the power to feed on thought, he
had outlived generations of men, and cycles of changes, and yet there
had been life left in the huge gaunt limbs and sight in the sunken eyes.
Then he had outlived pride itself, and the ancient scholar had begged
his bread. In his hundredth year he had leaned for rest against Unorna's
door, and she had taken him in and cared for him, and since that time
she had preserved his life. For his history was known in the ancient
city, and it was said that he had possessed great wisdom in his day.
Unorna knew that this wisdom could be hers if she could keep alive the
spark of life, and that she could employ his own learning to that end.
Already she had much experience of her powers, and knew that if she once
had the mastery of the old man's free will he must obey her fatally and
unresistingly. Then she conceived the idea of embalming, as it were, the
living being, in a perpetual hypnotic lethargy, from whence she recalled
him from time to time to an intermediate state, in which she caused
him to do mechanically all those things which she judged necessary to
prolong life.

Seeing her success from the first, she had begun to fancy that the