Then the end came slowly, without a sound, and she sank at the knees, gently, to a kneeling posture, then backward, extending her supple golden shape across the shroud; and lay there limp as a dead snake. Tressa went to the bowl of water and drew from it every blossom. The scarlet fish was now thrashing the water to an iridescent spume; and Tressa plunged in her hands and seized it and flung it out—squirming and wheezing crimson foam—on the shroud beside the golden girl of the Baroulass. Then, very slowly, she drew the shroud over the dying things; stepped back to the chair where her husband lay unconscious; knelt down beside him and took his head on her shoulder, gazing, all the while, at the outline of the dead girl under the snowy shroud. After a long while Cleves stirred and opened his eyes. Presently he turned his head sideways on her shoulder. “Tressa,” he whispered. “Hush,” she whispered, “all is well now.” But she did not move her eyes from the shroud, which now outlined the still shapes of _two_ human figures. “John Recklow!” she called in a low voice. Recklow entered noiselessly with drawn pistol. She motioned to him; he bent and lifted the edge of the shroud, cautiously. A bushy red beard protruded. “Togrul!” he exclaimed.... “But who is this young creature lying dead beside him?” Then Tressa caught the collar of her tunic in her left hand and flung back her lovely face looking upward out of eyes like sapphires wet with rain: “In the name of the one and only God,” she sobbed—“if there be no resurrection for dead souls, then I have slain this night in vain! “For what does it profit a girl if her soul be lost to a lover and her body be saved for her husband?” She rose from her knees, the tears still falling, and went and looked down at the outlined shapes beneath the shroud. Recklow had gone to the telephone to summon his own men and an ambulance. Now, turning toward Tressa from his chair: “God knows what we’d do without you, Mrs. Cleves. I believe this accounts for all the Yezidees except Sanang.” “Excepting Prince Sanang,” she said drearily. Then she went slowly to where her husband lay in his armchair, and sank down on the floor, and laid her cheek across his feet. CHAPTER XVII THE SLAYER OF SOULS In that great blizzard which, on the 4th of February, struck the eastern coast of the United States from Georgia to Maine, John Recklow and his men hunted Sanang, the last of the Yezidees. And Sanang clung like a demon to the country which he had doomed to destruction, imbedding each claw again as it was torn loose, battling for the supremacy of evil with all his dreadful psychic power, striving still to seize, cripple, and slay the bodies and souls of a hundred million Americans. Again he scattered the uncounted myriads of germs of the Black Plague which he and his Yezidees had brought out of Mongolia a year before; and once more the plague swept over the country, and thousands on thousands died.