She looked dreamily from under her half-closed lids at the perfect picture presented by the reflection, and then her tightly-closed lips melted into a smile, and she said softly to herself-- “Ah, that is a different sort of picture. I wonder what Alan would have thought if he could have seen _that_ one? I don’t think I should have taken my trip in the air-ship to-morrow if he had done. Well, I have seen myself as I am--what four generations of inherited hate and longing for revenge have made me. “In the light of that horrible flame I might have sat for the portrait of the lost soul of Lucrezia Borghia. Ah, well, if mine is lost, it shall be lost for something worth the exchange. ‘Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven,’ as old Milton said, and after all--who knows? “Bah! that is enough of dreaming, when the time for doing is so near. I must get some sleep to-night, or my eyes will have lost some of their brightness by to-morrow.” So saying, she busied herself putting away her phials, and powders, and apparatus. The half of the colourless liquid she had left she carefully decanted into a tiny flask, over the stopper of which she screwed a silver cap that had a little ring on the top, and this she hung on the chain round her neck. She replaced the slip of parchment in its silken bag, and carefully burnt the paper on which she had made her calculations. By this time the bottom of the crucible was glowing red hot. She noted the time that had elapsed since she had screwed the cap down, waited five minutes longer, and then extinguished the furnace, undressed, and got into bed, and in half an hour was sleeping as quietly as a little child. She had set the chime of her repeating watch to sound at six, and hung the watch close above her head. Calm as her sleep was at first, it was by no means dreamless, and her dreams were well fitted to be those of a guilty soul slumbering after a work of death. She saw herself standing with Alan on the glass-domed deck of the air-ship, beneath the light of a clear, white moon sailing high in the heavens, and a host of brilliant stars glittering out of the deep-blue depths beyond it. Far below them lay an unbroken cloud-sea of dazzling whiteness, which stretched away into the infinite distance on all sides, until it seemed to blend with the moonlight and melt into the sky. Then the scene changed, and the air-ship swept downwards in a wide, spiral curve, and plunged through the noiseless billows of the shadowy sea. As she did so, a fearful chorus of sounds rose up from the earth below.