“Who is that?” she cried, pressing her hand to her brow. “Why, it is Alan! But no, Alan is here—here. He has been with me all the time since Khalid shot him. My God, can he have come to life again?”
Her voice rose to a shrill wavering scream as she said this. She dropped Alma’s hand and ran with faltering, stumbling steps towards a divan on which lay the form of a man whose black beard and moustache were thickly clotted with blood. She stopped and bent over it for a moment, then she raised herself and faced them with her hands locked in her hair and the light of frenzied insanity blazing in her eyes.
“No! No!” she cried in a voice, half a scream and half a wail, that rang weirdly through the great chamber. “He is dead still and that is only his ghost. Oh, Alan, my love, Alan! Why could I not die with you? Curse the hand that wounded you. Curse”—
In the one syllable her voice died away from a scream to a whisper, and at the same instant the paralysis, which had already smitten her once, laid its swift icy hand on her heart and brain. She swayed to and fro for a moment and then fell forward across the corpse of the man whose love for her had plunged the world into madness on the eve of its doom.
“What an awful end!” gasped Alma, shuddering in the close embrace she had sought in Alan’s arms. “And yet, Alan, she loved you to the end through all. That love for you was the one true thing in her life, and for its sake I will say God forgive her! Come, let us go!”
THE END.
MORRISON AND GIBB, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The 8th of December, on which day, in the year 1904, the armies of the Anglo-Saxon Federation and the aerial navy of the Terrorists defeated and almost annihilated the hosts of the Franco-Slavonian League, then besieging London under the command of Alexander Romanoff, last of the Tsars of Russia, and so made possible the universal disarmament which took place the following year.—The Angel of the Revolution, chap. xlvi.