uite motionless, pale,
and silent.

"Let us commit no more follies, my angel," she said, trying not to let
Raphael see the dreadful forebodings that disturbed her. She covered her
face with her hands, for she saw Death before her--the hideous skeleton.
Raphael's face had grown as pale and livid as any skull unearthed from
a churchyard to assist the studies of some scientific man. Pauline
remembered the exclamation that had escaped from Valentin the previous
evening, and to herself she said:

"Yes, there are gulfs that love can never cross, and therein love must
bury itself."

On a March morning, some days after this wretched scene, Raphael found
himself seated in an armchair, placed in the window in the full light
of day. Four doctors stood round him, each in turn trying his pulse,
feeling him over, and questioning him with apparent interest. The
invalid sought to guess their thoughts, putting a construction on every
movement they made, and on the slightest contractions of their brows.
His last hope lay in this consultation. This court of appeal was about
to pronounce its decision--life or death.

Valentin had summoned the oracles of modern medicine, so that he might
have the last word of science. Thanks to his wealth and title, there
stood before him three embodied theories; human knowledge fluctuated
round the three points. Three of the doctors brought among them the
complete circle of medical philosophy; they represented the points of
conflict round which the battle raged, between Spiritualism, Analysis,
and goodness knows what in the way of mocking eclecticism.

The fourth doctor was Horace Bianchon, a man of science with a future
before him, the most distinguished man of the new school in medicine, a
discreet and unassuming representative of a studious generation that
is preparing to receive the inheritance of fifty years of experience
treasured up by the Ecole de Paris, a generation that perhaps will erect
the monument for the building of which the centuries behind us have
collected the different materials. As a personal friend of the Marquis
and of Rastignac, he had been in attendance on the former for some
days past, and was helping him to answer the inquiries of the three
professors, occasionally insisting somewhat upon those symptoms which,
in his opinion, pointed to pulmonary disease.

"You have been living at a great pace, leading a dissipated life, no
doubt, and you have devoted yourself largely to i