And when the Baroulass girl saw that her clenched hand was empty, felt her own pointed nails cutting into the tender flesh of her own palm, she stared at her blood-stained fingers in sudden terror—stared, spread them, shrieked where she stood, and writhed there trembling and screaming as though gripped in an invisible trap.
But she fell silent when the door of the room opened noiselessly behind her;—and it was as though she dared not turn her head to face the end of all things which had entered the room and was drawing nearer in utter silence.
Suddenly she saw its shadow on the wall; and her voice burst from her lips in a last shuddering scream.
Then the end came slowly, without a sound, and she sank at the knees, gently, to a kneeling posture, then backward, extending her supple golden shape across the shroud; and lay there limp as a dead snake.
Tressa went to the bowl of water and drew from it every blossom. The scarlet fish was now thrashing the water to an iridescent spume; and Tressa plunged in her hands and seized it and flung it out—squirming and wheezing crimson foam—on the shroud beside the golden girl of the Baroulass. Then, very slowly, she drew the shroud over the dying things; stepped back to the chair where her husband lay unconscious; knelt down beside him and took his head on her shoulder, gazing, all the while, at the outline of the dead girl under the snowy shroud.
After a long while Cleves stirred and opened his eyes. Presently he turned his head sideways on her shoulder.
“Tressa,” he whispered.
“Hush,” she whispered, “all is well now.” But she did not move her eyes from the shroud, which now outlined the still shapes of two human figures.
“John Recklow!” she called in a low voice.
Recklow entered noiselessly with drawn pistol. She motioned to him; he bent and lifted the edge of the shroud, cautiously. A bushy red beard protruded.