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“Poor young Hilsenhoff. And I am his wife and he is but thirty years old and I am fifty. Heigho!”

“Woman, you will drive me crazy,” said the great annotator of the Upanishads, and he left for a kommers with the nearest barkeeper.

“As if you did not drive me crazy, you obese, misshapen wine skin! you bloated, blue-faced sot!” said the woman. “I deserted young Hilsenhoff for you, Hilsenhoff with his delicate cheeks and his soft yellow hair, and he is mine and I am his and I will let him out of the box and we will live together in love, the dear young thing. What if he does study sometimes? I shall not mind. He need not always sit with me in love’s dalliance.”

All at once it came home to her that if Moehrlein maintained the resuscitation of Hilsenhoff was impossible and charged her with believing it possible because she wished to believe it so, it might also be true that he did not believe it possible because he did not wish to so believe. The burned out eyes that told of dreams of men, men who these many years had not included her husband, smoldered with a sudden fire. With a song in her heart, she was up and bustling about. She filled a brazier with coals and got a frying-pan and wheat-cake batter, and a razor and a crocheting hook–ah, she knew how the process of restoring suspended animation was practised. She lumbered up into the third story with her burdens, into the room where slept the lodger. Not for fifteen years had anyone looked into that sleeping chamber. The blinds and curtains, all were drawn, the dust lay thick under foot. She let in the light of day at every window. There sat the box in the middle of the floor, hooped with bands of iron and with the great seal of the University of Bonn stamped upon the lock. She broke the seal and turned the lock and then sank down in a sudden faintness of heart. Indeed, how loath she was to put an end to the dream that had just now filled her whole being with rapture, and what else would it be but to put an end to it when she delved into that box? She would go away and let herself dream on a few days more before putting the matter to its final test, perhaps never doing so. Thus she reasoned, and yet her hand, as she sat before the box with averted face, rose as if impelled by the volition of another intelligence, over the edge of the box, down to the mass of wool and wadding, through it to the wrappings and swathings in the middle, through the wrapping, and felt–the thrill of unimaginable joy ran through her. It was not bones, it was not bones!

Into the room of the lodger came Dr. August Moehrlein. The coals of the brazier were out, the batter had been turned into cakes, the razor was covered with hair, four waxen plugs lay by the crocheting hook. The process was over. The sleeper was awake and there he stood, his delicate face yet pinched with sleep and his eyes heavy, but alive and young, young Hilsenhoff with his soft yellow hair and mild blue eyes. On the floor before him in an attitude of adoration, knelt the woman who in the view of the law, was his wife, her eyes burned out no longer, but aflash with youthful passion. But in her eyes alone was there youth. Nothing of youthful archness and coquetry was there in her gaze, only greed, the sickening fondness of an aging woman for a young man. In a daze, he stared at her and heard her clumsy compliments, her vulgar protestations of love, things which the ripe beauty of her youth might have condoned, but now were nauseating. He saw her heavy jowls and sensual lips, the thick nose and all the revenges of time upon a once beautiful body that had clothed an ugly soul. He looked at his own rusty clothing, stiff and hard and creased in a thousand wrinkles, and into the mildewed nest where the mould from the moisture of his own body grew thick and green and horrible. He gazed at Dr. Moehrlein, the one-time Adonis of Bonn, and he shuddered, and which of what he looked at, or whether all, made him do so, he could not tell.