The struggling figures also fell. The burglar was beneath, and as he landed, his weapon was knocked from his hand. With a blow and a sudden twist Amos wrenched away, picked up the pistol, turned upon his swiftly rising foe, and sent a bullet through his skull. Without a sound the man sank back again to the floor. “Are you hurt, Moll?” was the first question as Amos took a step toward the white, crouching figure. Her bare arm shot out into the moonlight and a finger pointed across the library. “There’s another! look out!” The second man, in his stocking feet like his comrade, had crept from his hiding place, and as she pointed he swung up his pistol and pulled the trigger. But Amos was quicker. Shots in rapid succession echoed through the house, two, three, perhaps half a dozen, she never knew; but she saw to her joy, that Amos at the end of it all was still standing, while the burglar, with a smothered malediction, tumbled heavily into an easy chair behind him, slid out of it to his knees, and pitched forward on his face. There was a convulsive twitching of the legs, and all was still again. Beneath him lay a bag into which, a few moments before, had been stuffed the ancestral silver. As she climbed painfully to her feet, grasping with tremulous fingers a chair at her side, she saw Amos turn about, and with wavering steps, approach the column between the windows where, in the full light of the moon, hung a little calendar, and on it _Nov. 4_ He uttered no sound, but his head drooped and he staggered back. Reeling against a low divan he fell his length upon it, and lay with upturned face, motionless as the two men upon the floor. [Illustration: “The end has come, my Moll”] Molly hastened to his side and bent over him with an anxious question. In the full rays of the moon her head and neck with the white dress were almost luminous against the dim recesses of the room behind; and his eyes rested with a dazed, half-frightened look on the diamond crescent, then fell to her face, and up again to the jewels in her hair. With an effort he laid a hand upon her shoulder and answered, with a feeble smile, “The end has come, my Moll.” “No, no. Don’t say that! I’ll send for the doctor and have him here at once!” But the hand restrained her. “It’s of no use. The ball went here, through the chest.” “But, darling, your life may depend upon it! You don’t know.” “Yes--I do know. My own death, with you bending over me in the moonlight--in this room--I saw before we ever met. The same vision again--when you stood before me in the conservatory, was what--startled me--that night, a year ago.” He spoke with difficulty, in a failing tone. There followed broken words; from the face against his own tears fell upon his cheek, and she murmured, “Take me with you, Amos.” “No--not that;” then slowly, in a voice growing fainter with each word, “but there is no Heaven without you, Spirit--of Old-fashioned--Roses.”