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“Dead or alive? What are you thinking of?”

An idea had been taking shape in the woman’s mind without her realizing it. It had grown from her own words, rather than had the words sprung from the idea.

“Why, if a man be brought into a condition where all bodily functions are suspended and he is as he were dead, and remain in this condition for months and be brought out of it no more harmed than if he had slept overnight, why may it not be years, instead of months? Has any man ever proved that, in this condition, one may not live on indefinitely?” she said.

“No man has ever proved that one cannot, but what is more important, no man has ever proved that one can. No man has ever proved beyond shadow of doubt that one may not fashion wings and fly, but no man has ever demonstrated that one can. In India, only one man has ever tried to continue in a state of suspended animation for over six months, and that was the rajah who, condemned to death by the English, ostensibly died before the soldiers could come to carry out the sentence and was brought out of his tomb and restored to life three days after a new British viceroy had proclaimed a general amnesty to all past offenders. The period was eight months. If the viceroys had not been changed for a number of years, we might have learned more concerning the length of the period in which a man may continue in the semblance of death without it becoming reality. No, these twenty-five years has Hilsenhoff been bones.”

“Then let us take them out and bury them.”

“No, no. Then would I feel like a murderer indeed. I left him in there for you. Now let his bones rest there for sake of me.”

But the woman had become possessed of an idea which in turn possessed her, a dream, for which like all mankind, she would fight harder than for any substantiality, for no reality can be so glorious as a dream.

“But there was the man at Sutlej, the man who had himself buried in a wheat field for the edification of Alexander the Great, there to remain until a wheat crop had passed through its stages from sowing until harvest.”

“The man at Sutlej!” exclaimed the doctor impatiently. “That a man was thus buried, the pages of Quintus Curtius’s history show, and the Macedonian armies suddenly retreating from India, he was forgotten and not one, but two thousand wheat harvests have been garnered over his burial place.”

“But the article in the Revue Des Deux Mondes, telling how he had been found,” objected the woman faintly.

The doctor looked at her in amazement.

“What will not people do to believe that which they wish to believe. You, you, you!–do you ask me concerning that lie in the Revue Des Deux Mondes ? Oh, woman, woman! When did your memory of the details of that hoax fail you? Not longer ago than ten minutes. A lying Frenchman said he was on his way to France with a resuscitated contemporary of Alexander the Great and that a full account of the matter would be published in two or three months. Hilsenhoff left the duration of his stay in the box at my discretion, enjoining me, however, that he should not be taken out before the Frenchman had published the full account of the Sutlej case, for we would then have many interesting comparisons in his behavior and response to the restorative methods used, and the reaction and response of this man buried two thousand years to the same methods for restoring suspended animation. The Frenchman never arrived with his man. It was all a lie. Yet by following Hilsenhoff’s solemn injunctions to the letter, we had an excuse to leave him as dead, and you insisted that we should do so, and I, weak and infatuated with your ripe beauty, I agreed. You said that we would leave him in his self-chosen sleep and that he should be our lodger. And so he has been and we have never called him to breakfast in all these thirty years. We have even brought him to America with us and he sleeps. Ah, no, we did not slay him. We but obeyed his commands.”