“An inheritance,” explained his visitor. “Is the identification enough?”
Carringford nodded in a dazed way and handed back the picture. Any lingering doubt of the genuineness of this strange being or his science had vanished. His one thought now was that growing old need be no more than a fiction, after all that one might grow young instead, might lay aside the wrinkles and the gray hairs, and walk once more the way of purposes and dreams. His pulses leaped, his blood surged up and smothered him.
The acceptance of such a boon seemed too wonderful a thing to be put into words. His eyes grew wide and deep with the very bigness of it, but he could not for the moment find speech.
“You are willing to make the experiment?” the man asked. “I see many emotions in your mind. Think--think clearly, and make your decision.”
Words of acceptance rushed to Carringford’s lips. They were upon the verge of utterance when suddenly he was gripped by an old and dearly acquired habit--the habit of forethought.
“But I should want to keep my knowledge of the world,” he said, “to profit by my experience, my wisdom, such as it is. I should want to live my life over, knowing what I know now.”
The look of weariness which Carringford’s face had worn earlier had found its way to the face of the visitor.
“I seem to have heard most of those things before,” he said, with a faint smile.
“But shall I not remember the life I have lived, with its shortcomings, its blunders?”
“Yes, you will remember as well as you do now--better, perhaps, for your faculties will be renewed; but whether you will profit by it--that is another matter.”
“You mean that I shall make the same mistakes, commit the same sins?”
“Let us consider to a moment. You will go back to youth. You will be young again. Perhaps you have forgotten what it is to be young. Let me remind you.” The man’s lashes met; his voice seemed to come from a great distance. “It is to be filled with the very ecstasy of living,” he breathed--“its impulses, its fevers, the things that have always belonged to youth, that have always made youth beautiful. Your experience? Yes, you will have that, too; but it will not be the experience of that same youth, but of another--the youth that you were.” The gray eyes gleamed, the voice hardened a little. “Did you ever profit by the experience of another in that earlier time?”