The scholar, ordinarily so cool and self-contained, could not withhold an execration. His small eyes glittered, his face swelled with rage; for a moment he was within a little of an explosion. Of what mad, what insensate folly, unworthy of a schoolboy, worthy only of a sot, an imbecile, a Grio, had he been guilty! To leave the potion, that if it had not the virtues which he ascribed to it, had virtue--or it had not served his purpose of deceiving the Syndic during some days or hours--to leave the potion unprotected, at the mercy of a chance hand, of a treacherous girl! Safeguarded, in appearance only, and to blind his dupe! It seemed incredible that he could have been so careless! True, he might replace the stuff at some expense; but not in a day or an hour. And how--with one dose in all the world!--keep up the farce? The dose consumed, the play was at an end. An end--or, no, was he losing his wits, his courage? On the instant, in the twinkling of an eye, he shaped a fresh course. He cursed the girl anew, and apparently with the same fervour. "A month's work it cost me!" he cried. "A month's work! and ten gold pieces!" The Syndic, pale, and almost in a state of collapse--for the bitter satisfaction of imparting the news no longer supported him--stared. "A month's work?" he muttered. "A month? Years you told me! And a fortune!" "I told you? Never!" Basterga opened his eyes in seeming amazement. "Never, good sir, in all my life!" he repeated emphatically. "But"--returning grimly to his former point--"ten gold pieces, or a fortune--no matter which, she shall pay dearly for it, the thieving jade!" The Syndic sat heavily in his seat, and, with a hand on either arm of the abbot's chair, stared dully at the other. "A fortune, you told me," he said, in a voice little above a whisper. "And years. Was it a fiction, all a fiction? About Ibn Jasher, and the Physician of Aleppo, and M. Laurens of Paris, and--and the rest?" Basterga deliberately took a turn to the window, came back, and stood looking down at him. "Mon Dieu!" he muttered. "Is it possible?" "Eh?" "I can scarcely believe it!" The scholar spoke with a calmness half cynical, half compassionate. "But I suppose you really think that of me, though it seems incredible! You are under the impression that the drug this jade stole was the _remedium_ of Ibn Jasher, the one incomparable and sovereign result of long years of study and research? You believe that I kept this in a mere locked box, the key accessible by all who knew my habits, and the treasure at the mercy of the first thief! Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! If I said it a thousand times I could not express my astonishment. I might be the vine grower of the proverb, Cui saepe viator Cessisset magna compellans voce cucullum!"