"Your aphorism," said the chemist, "seems to me as a fact very stupid."

They began to laugh, and went off to dine like folk for whom a miracle
is nothing more than a phenomenon.

Valentin reached his own house shivering with rage and consumed with
anger. He had no more faith in anything. Conflicting thoughts shifted
and surged to and fro in his brain, as is the case with every man
brought face to face with an inconceivable fact. He had readily
believed in some hidden flaw in Spieghalter's apparatus; he had not been
surprised by the incompetence and failure of science and of fire;
but the flexibility of the skin as he handled it, taken with its
stubbornness when all means of destruction that man possesses had
been brought to bear upon it in vain--these things terrified him. The
incontrovertible fact made him dizzy.

"I am mad," he muttered. "I have had no food since the morning, and yet
I am neither hungry nor thirsty, and there is a fire in my breast that
burns me."

He put back the skin in the frame where it had been enclosed but lately,
drew a line in red ink about the actual configuration of the talisman,
and seated himself in his armchair.

"Eight o'clock already!" he exclaimed. "To-day has gone like a dream."

He leaned his elbow on the arm of the chair, propped his head with
his left hand, and so remained, lost in secret dark reflections and
consuming thoughts that men condemned to die bear away with them.

"O Pauline!" he cried. "Poor child! there are gulfs that love can never
traverse, despite the strength of his wings."

Just then he very distinctly heard a smothered sigh, and knew by one
of the most tender privileges of passionate love that it was Pauline's
breathing.

"That is my death warrant," he said to himself. "If she were there, I
should wish to die in her arms."

A burst of gleeful and hearty laughter made him turn his face towards
the bed; he saw Pauline's face through the transparent curtains, smiling
like a child for gladness over a successful piece of mischief. Her
pretty hair fell over her shoulders in countless curls; she looked like
a Bengal rose upon a pile of white roses.

"I cajoled Jonathan," said she. "Doesn't the bed belong to me, to me who
am your wife? Don't scold me, darling; I only wanted to surprise you, to
sleep beside you. Forgive me for my freak."

She sprang out of bed like a kitten, showed herself gleaming in her lawn
raiment, and sat down on Raphael's knee.