"
"How loving you are! I did not venture to suggest it----"
"Are you not my life?"
It would be tedious to set down accurately the charming prattle of the
lovers, for tones and looks and gestures that cannot be rendered alone
gave it significance. Valentin went back with Pauline to her own door,
and returned with as much happiness in his heart as mortal man can
know.
When he was seated in his armchair beside the fire, thinking over the
sudden and complete way in which his wishes had been fulfilled, a cold
shiver went through him, as if the blade of a dagger had been plunged
into his breast--he thought of the Magic Skin, and saw that it had
shrunk a little. He uttered the most tremendous of French oaths,
without any of the Jesuitical reservations made by the Abbess of
Andouillettes, leant his head against the back of the chair, and sat
motionless, fixing his unseeing eyes upon the bracket of the curtain
pole.
"Good God!" he cried; "every wish! Every desire of mine! Poor
Pauline!----"
He took a pair of compasses and measured the extent of existence that
the morning had cost him.
"I have scarcely enough for two months!" he said.
A cold sweat broke out over him; moved by an ungovernable spasm of
rage, he seized the Magic Skin, exclaiming:
"I am a perfect fool!"
He rushed out of the house and across the garden, and flung the
talisman down a well.
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