pressed the boy's face against her breast and, her good gray eyes
flashing with her angry determination to resist, cried out "Do with your
elixir what you will, only leave me the child in peace! Little Zeno
speaks the truth without any of your mixtures. A child's mind is a holy
thing, so his mother who is now an angel would tell you, and I--I will
not permit you to misuse it, in order to try your arts upon it!"

And stranger yet! The doctor accepted this rebuff and did not even
reprove the old lady for her disrespectful opposition, he only answered.
with calm certainty: "Neither the child nor any one else is needed to
make the experiment."

He inhaled the contents of the phial himself, in long breaths, staring
for some time thoughtfully at the floor and then at the arches of the
ceiling. His chest rose and fell heavily, and he wiped the perspiration
now and then from his damp brow. Frau Schimmel watched him anxiously,
and she could not say whether he looked more like a madman or a saint as
he finally lifted his arms towards heaven and cried: "I have found it,
Father, Bianca!--I have found it!"

Frau Schimmel left him alone and put the child to bed. When she returned
to the laboratory and found the doctor in the same place where she had
left him, she said modestly: "Here I am and if it pleases the Herr Doctor
to try the elixir on so humble a person as myself, I am at his service.
Only one favour would I ask: would the Herr Doctor be so kind as not to
ask questions about Schimmel and myself or any member of the honoured
Ueberhell family."

But the doctor hesitated awhile before accepting this offer, for he had
not forgotten the defiant words with which she had withheld his child