Icléa's body made a dull, strange, and frightful sound in the midnight stillness as it fell into the deep waters of the lake. Wild with grief and despair, Spero felt his hair bristling with horror. He opened his eyes wide, but saw nothing. Carried up by the balloon to a height of more than a thousand metres, he clung to the valve-rope, hoping to fall again towards the scene of Icléa's catastrophe; but the rope would not work. He fumbled and hunted, but without avail. In the midst of all he felt under his hand his loved one's veil, where it had caught on one of the ropes,—a thin little veil, still fresh with perfume, and filled with the memories of his lovely companion. He stared at the ropes, thinking he could find the imprint of her little clinging hands, and putting his own where Icléa's had been an instant before, he threw himself out of the car. His foot caught in a rope for a second, but he had strength enough to disengage it, and fell whirling into space.
The crew of a fishing-boat that had witnessed the closing scenes of the drama crowded all sail towards the spot in the lake into which the young girl had fallen, and succeeded in finding and rescuing her. She was not dead; but all the care lavished upon her could not prevent a fever from setting in and making her its prey.
In the morning the fishermen reached a little harbor on the borders of the lake, and carried her to their humble cot; but she did not regain consciousness. "George!" she cried, opening her eyes, "George!" and that was all. The next day she heard the village bell tolling a funeral knell. "George!" she repeated, "George!" His body was found in a terribly mangled condition a short distance from the shore. His fall was more than a thousand metres. It had begun over the lake; but the body, retaining the horizontal impetus given by the moving balloon, had not fallen vertically, it had descended obliquely, as if slipping down a rope following the course of the balloon; and like a mass thrown from the sky, had fallen into a meadow near the shore of the lake, making a deep indentation in the soil, and rebounding more than a metre from the place where it fell. His very bones were crushed into powder, and the brain protruded through the forehead. His grave had hardly been closed before they were obliged to dig another beside it for Icléa, who died murmuring in a feeble voice, "George! George!"
A single stone covers both graves, and the same willow-tree shades their sleep. To this day the dwellers on the shores of beautiful Lake Tyrifiorden remember the melancholy episode, which has become almost legendary; and when the gravestone of the lovers is shown to the tourist, their memory is always associated with a happy, happy dream that has vanished.
