Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI TO TAKE OR LEAVE THE house in the Corraterie, near the Porte Ter- tasse, differed in no outward respect from its neighbours. The same row of chestnut trees darkened its lower windows, the same breezy view of the Rhone meadows, the sloping vineyards and the far-off Jura lightened its upper rooms. A kindred life, a life apparently as quiet and demure, moved within its walls. Yet was the house a house apart. Silently and secretly it had absorbed and sucked and drawn into itself the hearts and souls and minds of two men. It held for the one that which the old prize above all things in this world—life; and for the other, that which the young set above life—love. Life? The Syndic did not doubt; the bait had been dangled before his eyes with too much cunning, too much skill. In a casket, in a room in that house in the Corraterie, his life lay hidden; his life, and he could not come at it! His life? Was it a marvel that waking or sleeping he saw only that house, and that room, and that casket chained to the wall; that he saw at one time the four steps rising to the door, and the placid front with its three tiers of windows; at another time, the room itself with its litter of scripts and dark-bound books, and rich furnishings, andphials and jars and strangely shaped alembics. Was it a marvel that in the dreams of the night the sick man toilec" up and up and up the narrow staircase, of which every poin remained fixed in his mind; or that waking, whatever his task, or wherever he might be, alone or in company, in his parlour or in the Town House, he still fell a-dreaming of the room and the box—the room and the box that held his life? Had this been the worst ! But it was not. There were times, bitter times, dark hours, when the pains were upon him, and he saw his fate ...