When James Turnbull saw this he suddenly put out a hand and seemed to support himself on the strong shoulder of Madeleine Durand.  Then after a moment’s hesitation he put his other hand on the shoulder of MacIan.  His blue eyes looked extraordinarily brilliant and beautiful.  In many sceptical papers and magazines afterwards he was sadly or sternly rebuked for having abandoned the certainties of materialism.  All his life up to that moment he had been most honestly certain that materialism was a fact.  But he was unlike the writers in the magazines precisely in this—­ that he preferred a fact even to materialism.

As the little singing figure came nearer and nearer, Evan fell on his knees, and after an instant Beatrice followed; then Madeleine fell on her knees, and after a longer instant Turnbull followed.  Then the little old man went past them singing down that corridor of flames.  They had not looked at his face.

When he had passed they looked up.  While the first light of the fire had shot east and west, painting the sides of ships with fire-light or striking red sparks out of windowed houses, it had not hitherto struck upward, for there was above it the ponderous and rococo cavern of its own monstrous coloured smoke.  But now the fire was turned to left and right like a woman’s hair parted in the middle, and now the shafts of its light could shoot up into empty heavens and strike anything, either bird or cloud.  But it struck something that was neither cloud nor bird.  Far, far away up in those huge hollows of space something was flying swiftly and shining brightly, something that shone too bright and flew too fast to be any of the fowls of the air, though the red light lit it from underneath like the breast of a bird.  Everyone knew it was a flying ship, and everyone knew whose.

As they stared upward the little speck of light seemed slightly tilted, and two black dots dropped from the edge of it.  All the eager, upturned faces watched the two dots as they grew bigger and bigger in their downward rush.  Then someone screamed, and no one looked up any more.  For the two bodies, larger every second flying, spread out and sprawling in the fire-light, were the dead bodies of the two doctors whom Professor Lucifer had carried with him—­the weak and sneering Quayle, the cold and clumsy Hutton.  They went with a crash into the thick of the fire.

“They are gone!” screamed Beatrice, hiding her head.  “O God!  The are lost!”

Evan put his arm about her, and remembered his own vision.

“No, they are not lost,” he said.  “They are saved.  He has taken away no souls with him, after all.”

He looked vaguely about at the fire that was already fading, and there among the ashes lay two shining things that had survived the fire, his sword and Turnbull’s, fallen haphazard in the pattern of a cross.