He had told her that he considered her influence to be purely a moral one, exerted by means of language and supported by her extraordinary concentrated will.

But it did not follow that he believed what he told her, and it was not improbable that he might have his own doubts on the subject--doubts which Unorna was not slow to suspect, and which destroyed for her the whole force of his reasoning.

She fell back upon a sort of grossly unreasonable mysticism, combined with a blind belief in those hidden natural forces and secret virtues of privileged objects, which formed the nucleus of mediaeval scientific research.

The field is a fertile one for the imagination and possesses a strange attraction for certain minds.

There are men alive in our own time to whom the transmutation of metals does not seem an impossibility, nor the brewing of the elixir of life a matter to be scoffed at as a matter of course.