nor poor.  She was primal woman; mighty mother of all men to come and Bride of Life.  She looked upon the man beside her and forgot all else but his manhood, his strong, vigorous manhood—­his sorrow and sacrifice.  She saw him glorified.  He was no longer a thing apart, a creature below, a strange outcast of another clime and blood, but her Brother Humanity incarnate, Son of God and great All-Father of the race to be.

He did not glimpse the glory in her eyes, but stood looking outward toward the sea and sending rocket after rocket into the unanswering darkness.  Dark-purple clouds lay banked and billowed in the west.  Behind them and all around, the heavens glowed in dim, weird radiance that suffused the darkening world and made almost a minor music.  Suddenly, as though gathered back in some vast hand, the great cloud-curtain fell away.  Low on the horizon lay a long, white star—­mystic, wonderful!  And from it fled upward to the pole, like some wan bridal veil, a pale, wide sheet of flame that lighted all the world and dimmed the stars.

In fascinated silence the man gazed at the heavens and dropped his rockets to the floor.  Memories of memories stirred to life in the dead recesses of his mind.  The shackles seemed to rattle and fall from his soul.  Up from the crass and crushing and cringing of his caste leaped the lone majesty of kings long dead.  He arose within the shadows, tall, straight, and stern, with power in his eyes and ghostly scepters hovering to his grasp.  It was as though some mighty Pharaoh lived again, or curled Assyrian lord.  He turned and looked upon the lady, and found her gazing straight at him.

Silently, immovably, they saw each other face to face—­eye to eye.  Their souls lay naked to the night.  It was not lust; it was not love—­it was some vaster, mightier thing that needed neither touch of body nor thrill of soul.  It was a thought divine, splendid.

Slowly, noiselessly, they moved toward each other—­the heavens above, the seas around, the city grim and dead below.  He loomed from out the velvet shadows vast and dark.  Pearl-white and slender, she shone beneath the stars.  She stretched her jeweled hands abroad.  He lifted up his mighty arms, and they cried each to the other, almost with one voice, “The world is dead.”

“Long live the——­”

“Honk!  Honk!” Hoarse and sharp the cry of a motor drifted clearly up from the silence below.  They started backward with a cry and gazed upon each other with eyes that faltered and fell, with blood that boiled.

“Honk!  Honk!  Honk!  Honk!” came the mad cry again, and almost from their feet a rocket blazed into the air and scattered its stars upon them.  She covered her eyes with her hands, and her shoulders heaved.  He dropped and bowed, groped blindly on his knees about the floor.  A blue flame spluttered lazily after an age, and she heard the scream of an answering rocket as it flew.

Then they stood still as death, looking to opposite ends of the earth.