he poet cried; "ought we not to sacrifice ourselves
for our friends?"

"I have almost a mind to wish that you all were dead," Valentin made
answer, with a dark, inscrutable look at his boon companions.

"Dying people are frightfully cruel," said Emile, laughing. "You are
rich now," he went on gravely; "very well, I will give you two months at
most before you grow vilely selfish. You are so dense already that
you cannot understand a joke. You have only to go a little further to
believe in your Magic Skin."

Raphael kept silent, fearing the banter of the company; but he drank
immoderately, trying to drown in intoxication the recollection of his
fatal power.

III. THE AGONY

In the early days of December an old man of some seventy years of age
pursued his way along the Rue de Varenne, in spite of the falling rain.
He peered up at the door of each house, trying to discover the address
of the Marquis Raphael de Valentin, in a simple, childlike fashion,
and with the abstracted look peculiar to philosophers. His face plainly
showed traces of a struggle between a heavy mortification and an
authoritative nature; his long, gray hair hung in disorder about a face
like a piece of parchment shriveling in the fire. If a painter had come
upon this curious character, he would, no doubt, have transferred him
to his sketchbook on his return, a thin, bony figure, clad in black, and
have inscribed beneath it: "Classical poet in search of a rhyme."
When he had identified the number that had been given to him, this
reincarnation of Rollin knocked meekly at the door of a splendid
mansion.

"Is Monsieur Raphael in?" the worthy man inquired of the Swiss in
livery.

"My Lord the Marquis sees nobody," said the servant, swallowing a huge
morsel that he had just dipped in a large bowl of coffee.

"There is his carriage," said the elderly stranger, pointing to a fine
equipage that stood under the wooden canopy that sheltered the steps
before the house, in place of a striped linen awning. "He is going out;
I will wait for him."

"Then you might wait here till to-morrow morning, old boy," said the
Swiss. "A carriage is always waiting for monsieur. Please to go away. If
I were to let any stranger come into the house without orders, I should
lose an income of six hundred francs."

A tall old man, in a costume not unlike that of a subordinate in the
Civil Service, came out of the vestibule and hurried part of the
way down the steps, w