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!" He gave her a deep, somber, but very tender smile, and reached for one of the deadly beakers, "To another meeting!" he said as his fingers closed on it. Suddenly, amazingly, the strident ring of a doorbell sounded, the more surprising since they had all but forgotten the existence of a world about them. Interruption! It meant only the going through once more of all that they had just passed. "Drink it!" exclaimed Pat impulsively, seizing the remaining beaker. 29 Scopolamine for Satan The glass was struck from Pat's hand, and the water-clear contents streamed into pools and darkening blots over the table and its litter of papers. She stared unseeingly at the mess, without realizing that it was Nick who had dashed the draught from her very lips. She felt neither anger nor relief, but only a numbness, and a sense of anti-climax. Somewhere below the bell was ringing again, and a door was resounding to violent blows, but she only continued her bewildered, questioning gaze. "I can't let you, Pat!" he muttered, answering her unspoken query. "But Nick--why?" "There's somebody at the door, isn't there? Mustn't we find out who?" "What difference can it make?" she asked wearily. "I don't know. I want to find out." "It's that illusion of hope again," she murmured. "That's all it is, Nick--and it means now that it's all to do over again! The whole thing, from the beginning--and we were so near--the end!"