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.

"Clang--crash--clang!"

The roar and ring of swift elevators shooting upward from below made the
great tower tremble. A murmur and babel of voices swept in upon the
night. All over the once dead city the lights blinked, flickered, and
flamed; and then with a sudden clanging of doors the entrance to the
platform was filled with men, and one with white and flying hair rushed
to the girl and lifted her to his breast. "My daughter!" he sobbed.

Behind him hurried a younger, comelier man, carefully clad in motor
costume, who bent above the girl with passionate solicitude and gazed
into her staring eyes until they narrowed and dropped and her face
flushed deeper and deeper crimson.

"Julia," he whispered; "my darling, I thought you were gone forever."

She looked up at him with strange, searching eyes.

"Fred," she murmured, almost vaguely, "is the world--gone?"

"Only New York," he answered; "it is t