Page:The Ball and the Cross.djvu/413

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 some one 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! They 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.