Suddenly, silver sweet in the moonlight and the silence, came the musical fall of a peal of bells--joy-bells from the distant tower of Flamestead Church--joy-bells ringing in the new year. "My God!" cried Lavendale, "the clocks were wrong!" He gazed at Judith with wide distended eyes, and the ghastly pallor on his face took a more livid hue. "Beloved, my mother's ghost spoke truth," he said: "death calls me with the stroke of midnight. Beloved, beloved, never, never, never to be mine! But O, 'tis more blessed than all I have known of life to die here--thus." His head was on her breast, her arms were wreathed round him, supporting that heavy brow, on which the death-dews were gathering. Yes, it was death. The cord, worn to attenuation long ago, had snapped at last; the last sands of that wasted life had run out; and just when life seemed worth living, death called the repentant sinner from the arms of love. From the earthly love to love beyond, from the known to the unknown. In that swift, sudden passage from life to death, he had been less of an infidel than in the active life behind him. It had seemed to him that a gate opened into the dim distance of eternity; that he stretched out his arms to some one or to something that called and beckoned; that he went not to outer darkness and extinction, but to a new existence. Yet the wrench was scarce less bitter, since it parted him from the woman he loved. Friendly hands carried that lifeless form into the old house, and laid the dead Lord Lavendale upon the bed where his father had lain before him in the same funeral solemnity. Curtains and blinds were drawn in all the windows; the guests, who had been so merry at the feast on New Year's Eve, hurried off on New Year's morning as fast as coach-horses could be got to carry them away; and the year began at Lavendale Manor in the shadow of mourning. Only Herrick and Irene stayed in the darkened house, and watched and prayed in the death-chamber. And so the house of Lavendale expired with its last representative. Name and race vanished suddenly from the eyes of men like a ship that founders at sea. * * * * * Deeper yet drew the death shadows on Lavendale Manor House, for on the morning of Lord Lavendale's funeral the old Venetian chemist was found cold and stark beside his furnace, the elixir of life, the universal panacea, simmering in the crucible beside him, and his attenuated fingers clasping one of those antique guides to immortality, fraught with the wisdom of old Arabia, which had been his solace and delight. The shock of his friend and patron's death had accelerated the inevitable end. The lamp of life, nursed in solitude, economised by habits of exceptional temperance, had burned to the last drop of oil, and the discoverer, baulked in all his searching after the supernatural, had yet succeeded in living to his hundred and eleventh year. * * * * *