Darkness and Dawn | Page 3

Even the echoes flung back only
dull, vacuous sounds that deepened her sense of awful and incredible isolation.
What? No noise of human life anywhere to be heard? None! No familiar hum of the
metropolis now rose from what, when she had fallen asleep, had been swarming streets
and miles on miles of habitations.
Instead, a blank, unbroken leaden silence, that seemed part of the musty, choking
atmosphere--a silence that weighed down on Beatrice like funeral-palls.
Dumfounded by all this, and by the universal crumbling of every perishable thing, the girl
ran, shuddering, back into the office. There in the dust her foot struck something hard.
She stooped; she caught it up and stared at it.
"My glass ink-well! What? Only such things remain?"
No dream, then, but reality! She knew at length that some catastrophe, incredibly vast,
some disaster cosmic in the tragedy of its sweep, had desolated the world.
"Oh, my mother!" cried she. "My mother--dead? Dead, now, how long?"

She did not weep, but just stood cowering, a chill of anguished horror racking her. All at
once her teeth began to chatter, her body to shake as with an ague.
Thus for a moment dazed and stunned she remained there, knowing not which way to
turn nor what to do. Then her terror-stricken gaze fell on the doorway leading from her
outer office to the inner one, the one where Stern had had his laboratory and his
consultation-room.
This door now hung, a few worm-eaten planks and splintered bits of wood, barely
supported by the rusty hinges.
Toward it she staggered. About her she drew the sheltering masses of her hair, like a
Godiva of another age; and to her eyes, womanlike, the hot tears mounted. As she went,
she cried in a voice of horror.
"Mr. Stern! Oh--Mr. Stern! Are--are you dead, too? You can't be--it's too frightful!"
She reached the door. The mere touch of her outstretched hand disintegrated it. Down in
a crumbling mass it fell. Thick dust bellied up in a cloud, through which a single sun-ray
that entered the cobwebbed pane shot a radiant arrow.
Peering, hesitant, fearful of even greater terrors in that other room, Beatrice peered
through this dust-haze. A sick foreboding of evil possessed her at thought of what she
might find there--yet more afraid was she of what she knew lay behind her.
An instant she stood within the ruined doorway, her left hand resting on the moldy jam.
Then, with a cry, she started forward--a cry in which terror had given place to joy,
despair to hope.
Forgotten now the fact that, save for the shrouding of her messy hair, she stood naked.
Forgotten the wreck, the desolation everywhere.
"Oh--thank Heaven!" gasped she.
There, in that inner office, half-rising from the wrack of many things that had been and
were now no more, her startled eyes beheld the figure of a man--of Allan Stern!
He lived!
At her he peered with eyes that saw not, yet; toward her he groped a vague, unsteady
hand.
He lived!
Not quite alone in this world-ruin, not all alone was she!

CHAPTER II
REALIZATION
The joy in Beatrice's eyes gave way to poignant wonder as she gazed on him. Could this
be he?
Yes, well she knew it was. She recognized him even through the grotesquery of his
clinging rags, even behind the mask of a long, red, dusty beard and formidable mustache,
even despite the wild and staring incoherence of his whole expression.
Yet how incredible the metamorphosis! To her flashed a memory of this man, her
other-time employer--keen and smooth-shaven, alert, well-dressed, self-centered,
dominant, the master of a hundred complex problems, the directing mind of engineering
works innumerable.
Faltering and uncertain now he stood there. Then, at the sound of the girl's voice, he
staggered toward her with outflung hands. He stopped, and for a moment stared at her.
For he had had no time as yet to correlate his thoughts, to pull himself together.
And while one's heart might throb ten times, Beatrice saw terror in his blinking,
bloodshot eyes.
But almost at once the engineer mastered himself. Even as Beatrice watched him,
breathlessly, from the door, she saw his fear die out, she saw his courage well up fresh
and strong.
It was almost as though something tangible were limning the man's soul upon his face.
She thrilled at sight of him.
And though for a long moment no word was spoken, while the man and woman stood
looking at each other like two children in some dread and unfamiliar attic, an
understanding leaped between them.
Then, womanlike, instinctively as she breathed, the girl ran to him. Forgetful of every
convention and of her disarray, she seized his hand. And in a voice that trembled till it
broke she