and lungs and cleared the brain. Alpha would have walked with them
again. But his personality would not have been there. That mysterious
something, men call the soul, had fled forever, and so far mankind had
not been able to create its counterpart. To have brought life again to
Alpha would have been a travesty on the brilliant mind they had known.
Omega recalled many pathetic examples of such resuscitation where the
living had walked in death.

Omega foresaw the end, but he smiled in the face of it all. He was the
same kind and loving companion Thalma had always known, her every want
his command and law. But no more she realized its inspiration and love.
He seldom left her side any more, but sometimes overcome with sorrow he
would soar up above the peaks and commune alone with the past.

So to-day he had risen higher than usual. The red sun beat upon his body
as he hovered in the hot air, his eyes fixed on the distant sky line. He
gazed like a famished animal, for it seemed to him that at last a cloud
must appear above that hopeless shore of land and sky and bring renewed
life to him and his. Yet he fully realized the impossibility of such a
thing. Slowly his great, dark eyes roved around the horizon. He loathed
its dreary monotony, and still it fascinated him. Beyond that dead line
of land and sky lay nothing but ghastly death. His many voyages in the
airship and the reflecting Mirror told him that, but still he hoped on.

When at last he glided down to the cottage the sun was low. Having
registered the time in his mind when he left Thalma--for countless
generations man had dispensed with time-keeping devices--he realized
that he had been gone just three hours. Reproaching himself for his
negligence he entered the doorway, then stared aghast.

Upon Thalma's wide couch facing a painting of the ancient, green world,
she had placed the body of Alpha, then lain down by his side. Her glazed
eyes were fixed upon the picture, and for the first time in many weeks
there was a smile about her lips.

Omega knelt by her side, took her cold hands in his and feverishly
kissed her brow. With a grief too deep for tears he smiled at death,
thankful for the love she had borne him. Nor did he censure the Plan of
the Creator, the Plan that had led him, Omega, scion of the world's
great, up to the zenith of life and now left him alone, the sole
representative of its power. Thalma had passed on, and in the first
crushing moments of his