. "I did not know Tissot!" Claude
replied sharply and with a burning face--they were certainly laughing at
him. "And therefore I cannot say."

"Mercury, which completes the amalgam," the stout man muttered absently
and as if to himself, "when heated sublimes over!" Then turning after a
moment's silence to the girl, "What says our Quintessential Stone to
this?" he continued. "Her Tissot gone will she still work her wonders?
Still of base Grios and the weak alloys red bridegrooms make?
Still--kind Anne, your hand!"

Silence! Silence again. What were they doing? Claude, full of suspicion,
turned to see what it meant; turned to learn what it was on which the
greedy eyes of his table-fellow were fixed so intently. And now he saw,
more or less. The stout man and Grio had their heads together and their
faces bent over the girl's hand, which the former held. On them,
however, Claude scarcely bestowed a glance. It was the girl's face which
caught and held his eyes, nay, made them burn. Had it blushed, had it
showed white, he had borne the thing more lightly, he had understood it
better. But her face showed dull and apathetic; as she stood looking
down at the men, suffering them to do what they would with her hand, a
strange passivity was its sole expression. When the big man (whose name
Claude learned later was Basterga), after inspecting the palm, kissed it
with mock passion, and so surrendered it to Grio, who also pressed his
coarse lips to it, while the young man beside Claude laughed, no change
came over her. Released, she turned again to the hearth, impassive. And
Claude, his heart beating, recognised that this was the hundredth
performance; that so far from being a new thing it was a thing so old as
to be stale to her, moving her less, though there were insult and
derision in every glance of the men's eyes, than it moved him.

And noting this he began in a dim way to understand. This was the thing
which Tissot had not been able to bear; which in the end had driven the
young man with the small chin from the house. This was the pleasantry to
which his feeble resistance, his outbursts of anger, of jealousy, or of
protest had but added piquancy, the ultimate sting of pleasure to the
jaded palate of the performers. This was the obsession under which she
lay, the trial and persecution which she had warned him he would find it
hard to witness.

Hard? He believed her, trifling as was the thing he had seen. For behind
it he had