“It is three minutes of four, John.”

The watch slipped from her fingers, and now she drew herself up so that her arms were about his neck, and their faces touched.

“Dear John, you love me?”

“So much that even now, in the face of death, I am happy,” he whispered.  “Joanne, sweetheart, we are not going to be separated.  We are going—­together.  Through all eternity it must be like this—­you and I, together.  Little girl, wind your hair about me—­tight!”

“There—­and there—­and there, John!  I have tied you to me, and you are buried in it!  Kiss me, John——­”

And then the wild and terrible fear of a great loneliness swept through him.  For Joanne’s voice had died away in a whispering breath, and the lips he kissed did not kiss him back, and her body lay heavy, heavy, heavy in his arms.  Yet in his loneliness he thanked God for bringing her oblivion in these last moments, and with his face crushed to hers he waited.  For he knew that it was no longer a matter of minutes, but of seconds, and in those seconds he prayed, until up through the warm smother of her hair—­with the clearness of a tolling bell—­came the sound of the little gong in his watch striking the Hour of Four!

In space other worlds might have crumbled into ruin; on earth the stories of empires might have been written and the lives of men grown old in those first century-long seconds in which John Aldous held his breath and waited after the chiming of the hour-bell in the watch on the cavern floor.  How long he waited he did not know; how closely he was crushing Joanne to his breast he did not realize.  Seconds, minutes, and other minutes—­and his brain ran red in dumb, silent madness.  And the watch!  It ticked, ticked, ticked! It was like a hammer.

He had heard the sound of it first coming up through her hair.  But it was not in her hair now.  It was over him, about him—­it was no longer a ticking, but a throb, a steady, jarring, beating throb.  It grew louder, and the air stirred with it.  He lifted his head.  With the eyes of a madman he stared—­and listened.  His arms relaxed from about Joanne, and she slipped crumpled and lifeless to the floor.  He stared—­and that steady beat-beat-beat—­a hundred times louder than the ticking of a watch—­pounded in his brain.  Was he mad?  He staggered to the choked mouth of the tunnel, and then there fell shout upon shout, and shriek upon shriek from his lips, and twice, like a madman now, he ran back to Joanne and caught her up in his arms, calling and sobbing her name, and then shouting—­and calling her name again.  She moved; her eyes opened, and like one gazing upon the spirit of the dead she looked into the face of John Aldous, a madman’s face in the lantern-glow.

“John—­John——­”

She put up her hands, and with a cry he ran with her in his arms to the choked tunnel.

“Listen!  Listen!” he cried wildly.  “Dear God in Heaven, Joanne—­can you not hear them?  It’s Blackton—­Blackton and his men!  Hear—­hear the rock-hammers smashing!  Joanne—­Joanne—­we are saved!”