d to remain stretched out for ever, the
wide eyes had come to have a ghastly fixity.

He was dead, and in death he lost his last and sole illusion.

He had sought a shelter in his son's heart, and it had proved to be a
sepulchre, a pit deeper than men dig for their dead. The hair on his
head had risen and stiffened with horror, his agonized glance still
spoke. He was a father rising in just anger from his tomb, to demand
vengeance at the throne of God.

"There! it is all over with the old man!" cried Don Juan.

He had been so interested in holding the mysterious phial to the lamp,
as a drinker holds up the wine-bottle at the end of a meal, that he had
not seen his father's eyes fade. The cowering poodle looked from his
master to the elixir, just as Don Juan himself glanced again and again
from his father to the flask. The lamplight flickered. There was a
deep silence; the viol was mute. Juan Belvidero thought that he saw his
father stir, and trembled. The changeless gaze of those accusing eyes
frightened him; he closed them hastily, as he would have closed a
loose shutter swayed by the wind of an autumn night. He stood there
motionless, lost in a world of thought.

Suddenly the silence was broken by a shrill sound like the creaking of
a rusty spring. It startled Don Juan; he all but dropped the phial. A
sweat, colder than the blade of a dagger, issued through every pore. It
was only a piece of clockwork, a wooden cock that sprang out and crowed
three times, an ingenious contrivance by which the learned of that epoch
were wont to be awakened at the appointed hour to begin the labors of
the day. Through the windows there came already a flush of dawn. The
thing, composed of wood, and cords, and wheels, and pulleys, was more
faithful in its service than he in his duty to Bartolommeo--he, a man
with that peculiar piece of human mechanism within him that we call a
heart.

Don Juan the sceptic shut the flask again in the secret drawer in the
Gothic table--he meant to run no more risks of losing the mysterious
liquid.

Even at that solemn moment he heard the murmur of a crowd in the
gallery, a confused sound of voices, of stifled laughter and light
footfalls, and the rustling of silks--the sounds of a band of revelers
struggling for gravity. The door opened, and in came the Prince and Don
Juan's friends, the seven courtesans, and the singers, disheveled and
wild like dancers surprised by the dawn, when the tapers that h