Then, just as Sheldon was prepared for a mad attack of the pitifully broken figure, the pale lips parted to a cry such as he had never in all his life heard. It was a cry of pure triumph; the voice was wonderfully clear now and went ringing through the silence like a bell’s tinkling notes. The eyes, too, were clear, bright as before, but now triumphant, like the voice, untroubled, filled with the sheer ecstasy of perfect gladness.
“Look!” cried the madman. “It is the Golden Emperor of Infinity! Look! He is coming—to me!”
Erect, he no longer swayed. The long right arm thrown out, pointed toward the western sky and was rigid, unshaken. For the moment the figure was dominant, masterful; the gesture demanded and received obedience. In his final moment, Charles Francis Hamilton stood clothed in conscious power, unshaken in a great faith—triumphant. There was no other word for him then.
“Look!” cried the madman.
But was he mad?
For both Paula and John Sheldon turned and looked—and saw what the old man saw. There in the strange, weird light in the west, clear against the sky, were a great pair of wings flashing like pure beaten gold, as a graceful, speeding body described a long, sweeping curve, seemed for a moment to be dropping below the mountain-tops, then rose, climbing higher and higher.
Higher and higher—until it was gone, until, as the wide wings trembled in the vault of the clearing heavens, John Sheldon saw that they were no longer beaten gold, but just the feathered wings of a great eagle, metamorphosed for an instant by a trick of sun.
But it was gone. Gone with it the soul of a madman. Without a cry, his old lips forming into a smile indescribably sweet, his eyes still bright with victory, he stooped, stooped farther, his legs weakened under him, he settled down, rested a moment, fell backward. His Golden Emperor of the Infinite had borne away upon its golden wings the soul which craved and now won—immortality!
“He is dead!” said Paula lifelessly. “He is dead!”