know the story of Andromeda? he said.

--Perhaps I did once, but suppose I don't remember it.

He told her the story of the unfortunate maiden chained to a rock and
waiting for a sea-beast that was coming to devour her, and how Perseus
came and set her free, and won her love with her life. And then he
began something about a young man chained to his rock, which was
a star-gazer's tower, a prey by turns to ambition, and lonely
self-contempt and unwholesome scorn of the life he looked down upon
after the serenity of the firmament, and endless questionings that led
him nowhere,--and now he had only one more question to ask. He loved
her. Would she break his chain?--He held both his hands out towards her,
the palms together, as if they were fettered at the wrists. She took
hold of them very gently; parted them a little; then wider--wider--and
found herself all at once folded, unresisting, in her lover's arms.

So there was a new double-star in the living firmament. The
constellations seemed to kindle with new splendors as the student and
the story-teller walked homeward in their light; Alioth and Algol looked
down on them as on the first pair of lovers they shone over, and the
autumn air seemed full of harmonies as when the morning stars sang
together.

XII

The old Master had asked us, the Young Astronomer and myself, into his
library, to hear him read some passages from his interleaved book. We
three had formed a kind of little club without knowing it from the
time when the young man began reading those extracts from his poetical
reveries which I have reproduced in these pages. Perhaps we agreed in
too many things,--I suppose if we could have had a good hard-headed,
old-fashioned New England divine to meet with us it might have acted as
a wholesome corrective. For we had it all our own way; the Lady's kindly
remonstrance was taken in good part, but did not keep us from talking
pretty freely, and as for the Young Girl, she listened with the
tranquillity and fearlessness which a very simple trusting creed
naturally gives those who hold it. The fewer outworks to the citadel of
belief, the fewer points there are to be threatened and endangered.

The reader must not suppose that I even attempt to reproduce everything
exactly as it took place in our conversations, or when we met to listen
to the Master's prose or to the Young Astronomer's verse. I do not
pretend to give all the pauses and interruptions by question