marvellous woman; that Mark Antony must have seen it, may have touched
it; that Ptolemy Auletes knew all about it, and that it is older, sir,
than the Christian religion itself!"

He held it out upon the flat of his palm, the better for Cleek to see
and to admire it, and signed to his son to hand the visitor a magnifying
glass.

"Wonderful, most wonderful!" observed Cleek, bending over the spurious
gem and focussing the glass upon it; not, however, for the purpose of
studying the fraud, but to examine something just noticed--something
round and red and angry-looking which marked the palm itself, at the
base of the middle finger.

"No wonder you are proud of such a prize. I think I should go off my
head with rapture if I owned an antique like that. But, pardon me, have
you met with an accident, Mr. Bawdrey? That's an ugly place you have on
your palm."

"That? Oh, that's nothing," he answered, gaily. "It itches a great deal
at times, but otherwise it isn't troublesome. I can't think how in the
world I got it, to tell the truth. It came out as a sort of red blister
in the beginning, and since it broke it has been spreading a great deal.
But, really, it doesn't amount to anything at all."

"Oh, that's just like you, dad," put in Philip, "always making light of
the wretched thing. I notice one thing, however, Rickaby, it seems to
grow worse instead of better. And dad knows as well as I do when it
began. It came out suddenly about a fortnight ago, after he had been
holding some green worsted for my stepmother to wind into balls. Just