He too was standing up, quaking with an icy chill. She had already forced out the stopper and half emptied the phial with a mad, ecstatic smile. "Eva!" he shrieked. And quite calmly, smiling still, she handed it to him. He looked at her for a moment, feeling as if they two were already no longer of this world, as if they were floating in a sphere of unknown natural laws, in which strange things must come to pass. The world, as it seemed, was about to perish in that deluge of pouring rain. But he saw that she stood waiting with her strange smile--and he drank. It was quite dark; they lay on the sofa side by side, in each other's arms. He was dead. She raised her head in an agony of alarm at the storm which was raging outside, and that other storm which was raging in her dying body. The lightning glared white and the thunder was close overhead. But louder than the echoes in the air the thunder came rolling on towards Eva, nearer and nearer, louder and louder, a supernatural thunder, on the wheels of the spheres. "It is coming!" she murmured, in the anguish of death. "Great heavens! the thunder again!" And she sank convulsed on the body of her lover, hiding her head under his coat, to die there. Then came a shuffling step in the passage outside the dark room. An old man's thin voice twice called the name of Eva; and a hand opened the door. The End.