"No," she murmured, burying her face against his shoulder. "I'm the coward, Nick. I'm the one that's frightened, and I'm the one that broke down! It's just been—too much, this evening; I'm all right now."
"But we'll not go through with this, Pat!"
"But we will! It's better than life without you, Dear. We've argued and argued, and at last forgotten the one truth, the one thing I'll never retract: I can't face living without you, Nick! I can't!"
He brushed his hand wearily before his eyes. "Back at the starting point," he muttered. "All right, Honey. So be it!"
He strode again to the cabinet. "Corrosive sublimate," he murmured. "Cyanide of Potassium. They're both deadly, but I think the second is rapid, and therefore less painful. Cyanide let it be!"
He extracted two small beakers from the glassware on the shelf. He filled them with water from a carafe on the table, and, while the girl watched him with fascinated eyes, he deliberately tilted a spoonful or so of white crystals into each of them. The mixture swirled a moment, then settled clear and colorless, and the crystals began to shrink as they passed swiftly into solution.
"There it is," he announced grimly. "There's peace, oblivion, forgetfulness, and annihilation for you, for me, and—for him! Beyond all doubt, the logical course for us, isn't it? Do we take it?"
"Please," she said faintly. "Kiss me first, Honey. Isn't that the proper course for lovers in this situation?" She felt a faint touch of astonishment at her own irony; the circumstances had ceased to have any reality to her, and had become merely a dramatic sequence like the happenings in a play.
He gathered her again into his arms and pressed his lips to hers. It was a long, tender, wistful kiss; when at last it ended, Pat found her eyes again filled with tears, but not this time the tears of hysteria.
"Nick!" she murmured. "Nick, darling!"