oison, still he persisted, thinking at last he might overcome
her. Even, in his frenzy, he sought for her mouth with his
mouth, though it was like putting his face into some awful
death. She yielded to him, and he pressed himself upon her in
extremity, his soul groaning over and over:

"Let me come--let me come."

She took him in the kiss, hard her kiss seized upon him, hard
and fierce and burning corrosive as the moonlight. She seemed to
be destroying him. He was reeling, summoning all his strength to
keep his kiss upon her, to keep himself in the kiss.

But hard and fierce she had fastened upon him, cold as the
moon and burning as a fierce salt. Till gradually his warm, soft
iron yielded, yielded, and she was there fierce, corrosive,
seething with his destruction, seething like some cruel,
corrosive salt around the last substance of his being,
destroying him, destroying him in the kiss. And her soul
crystallized with triumph, and his soul was dissolved with agony
and annihilation. So she held him there, the victim, consumed,
annihilated. She had triumphed: he was not any more.

Gradually she began to come to herself. Gradually a sort of
daytime consciousness came back to her. Suddenly the night was
struck back into its old, accustomed, mild reality. Gradually
she realized that the night was common and ordinary, that the
great, blistering, transcendent night did not really exist. She
was overcome with slow horror. Where was she? What was this
nothingness she felt? The nothingness was Skrebensky. Was he
really there?--who was he? He was silent, he was not there.
What had happened? Had she been mad: what horrible thing had
possessed her? She was filled with overpowering fear of herself,
overpowering desire that it should not be, that other burning,
corrosive self. She was seized with a frenzied desire that what
had been should never be remembered, never be thought of, never
be for one moment allowed possible. She denied it with all her
might. With all her might she turned away from it. She was good,
she was loving. Her heart was warm, her blood was dark and warm
and soft. She laid her hand caressively on Anton's shoulder.

"Isn't it lovely?" she said, softly, coaxingly, caressingly.
And she began to caress him to life again. For he was dead. And
she intended that he should never know, never become aware of
what had been. She would bring him back from the dead without
leaving him one trace of fact to remember his