“My dear marquis,” he said, “I’ve been looking for you all the evening.  Wasn’t your mother a Miss O’Flaharty?”

“Yes, she was,” said Raphael—­“Barbara O’Flaharty.”

“Well, you are the sole heir of Major O’Flaharty, who died last August at Calcutta, leaving a fortune of six millions.”

“An incalculable fortune,” said Emile.  Raphael spread out the skin upon the napkin.  He shuddered violently on seeing a slight margin between the pencil-line on the napkin and the edge of the skin.

“What’s the matter?” said the notary.  “He has got a fortune very cheaply.”

“Hold him up,” said some one.  “The joy will kill him.”

A ghostly whiteness spread over the face of the happy heir.  He had seen Death!  He stared at the shrunken skin and the merciless outline on the napkin, and a feeling of horror came over him.  The whole world was his; he could have all things.  But at what a cost!

“Do you wish for some asparagus, sir?” said, a waiter.

“I wish for nothing!” shrieked Raphael.  And he fled from the banquet.

“So,” he said, when he was at last alone, “in this enlightened age, when science has stripped the very stars of their secrets, here am I frightened out of my senses by an old piece of wild ass’s skin.  To-morrow I will have it examined by Planchette, and put an end to this mad fancy.”

Planchette, the celebrated professor of mechanics, treated the thing as a joke.

“Come with me to Spieghalter,” he said.  “He has just built a new kind of hydraulic press which I designed.”

Arrived there, Planchette asked Spieghalter to stretch the magic skin.  “Our friend,” he said, “doubts if we can do it.”

“You see this crank?” said Spieghalter to Raphael, pointing to the new press.  “Seven turns to it, and a solid steel bar would break into thousands of pieces.”

“The very thing I want,” said Raphael.

Planchette put the skin between the metal plates, and, proud of his new invention, he energetically twisted the crank.

“Lie flat all of you!” shouted Spieghalter.  “We’re dead men.”

There was an explosion, and a jet of water spurted out with terrific force.  Falling on a furnace it twisted up the mass of iron as if it had been paper.  The hydraulic chamber of the press had given way.

“The skin is untouched,” said Planchette.  “There was a flaw in the press.”

“No, no!” said Spieghalter.  “My press was as sound as a bell.  The devil’s in your skin, sir.  Take it away!”

Spieghalter seized the talisman, and flung it on an anvil, and furiously belaboured it with a heavy sledgehammer.  He then pitched it in a furnace, and ordered his workmen to blow the coal into a fierce white heat.  At the end of ten minutes he drew it out with a pair of tongs uninjured.  With a cry of horror the workmen fled from the foundry.

“I now believe in the devil,” said Spieghalter.