"Master, ask for something else," said Balsamo, eluding the point.
"Ha! you do not answer; you cannot answer," taunted Althotas triumphantly.
"You must be mistaken on the efficacy of the means. It is impossible."
"It looks as if you argued with me, disputed, deem me a liar," said the old alchemist, rolling with cold anger his gray eyes under his white brows.
"No, but I am in contact with men and things, and you dwell in a nook, in the pure abstraction of a student; I see the difficulties and have to point them out."
"You would soon overcome such difficulties if you liked, or believed."
"I do not believe."
"But do you believe that death is an incontestable thing, invincible and infinite? And when you see a dead body, does not the perspiration come to your brow, and a regret is born in your breast?"
"No regret comes in to my breast because I have familiarized myself to all human miseries; and I esteem life as a little thing: but I say in presence of the corpse: 'Dead! thou who wert mighty as a god! O Death! it is thou who reign sovereignly, and nothing can prevail against thee.'"
Althotas listened in silence, with no other token of impatience than fidgeting with a scalpel in his hands. When his disciple had finished the solemn and doleful phrase, he smiled while looking round. His eyes, so burning that no secrets seemed to exist for him, stopped on a nook in the room, where a little dog trembled on a handful of straw. It was the last of three of a kind, which Balsamo had provided on request of the elder for his experiments.