His lips were covered with froth, and there was a savage light in his eyes.  Porriquet fled in terror.  Then Raphael fell back in a chair, and wept.

“Oh, my precious life!” he sobbed.  “No more kindly thoughts!  No more friendship!”

III.—­The Agony of Death

Raphael’s condition had by now become so critical that a trip to Savoy was advised, and a few weeks later he was at Aix.  One day, moving among the crowd of pleasure-seekers and invalids, a number of young men deliberately picked a quarrel with him, with the result that from one of them he received a challenge to fight a duel.  Raphael did his utmost to persuade the other to apologise, even going to the extent of informing him of the terrible powers he possessed.  Failing in his object, the fatal morning came round, and the unfortunate individual was shot through the heart.  Not heeding the fallen man, Raphael hurriedly glanced at the skin to see what another man’s life had cost him.  The talisman had shrunk to the size of a small oak-leaf.

Seeing that his master was given over to a gloomy despair that verged upon madness, Jonathan resolved to distract his mind at all costs, and knowing that he was passionately fond of music, he engaged a box for him at the Opera.  But Raphael was afraid above all things, of falling in love.  Under the illimitable desire of passion the magic skin would shrivel up in an hour.  So he used a strange, distorting opera-glass which made the loveliest face seem hideous.

With this he sat in his box, he surveyed the scene around him.  Who was that old man over there, sitting beside a dancing-girl that Raphael had seen at Taillefer’s?  The owner of the curiosity shop!  He had at last fallen in love, as Raphael had jestingly desired.  No doubt the magic skin had shrunk under that wish before Raphael had measured it.  A beautiful woman entered the theatre with a peer of France at her side.  A murmur of admiration arose as she took her seat.  She smiled at Raphael.  In spite of the distorted image on his opera-glass, Raphael knew her.  It was the Countess Foedora!  In a single glance of intolerable scorn the man she had played false avenged himself.  He did not waste an ill-wish on her.  He merely took the glasses from his eyes, and answered her smile with a look of cold contempt.  Everybody observed the sudden pallor of the countess; it was a public rejection.

“Raphael!”

The marquis turned at the sound of a beloved voice.  Pauline was sitting in the box next to his.  How beautiful she had grown!  How maidenly she was still!  Putting down his opera-glasses, Raphael talked to her of old times.

“You must come and see me to-morrow,” said Pauline.  “I have your great work on ‘The Theory of the Will.’  Don’t you remember leaving it in the garret?”

“I was mad and blind then,” said Raphael.  “But I am cured at last.”

“I wish Pauline to love me!” he kept repeating to himself all the way home.  “I wish Pauline to love me!”