like a little wisp of white smoke rising from a very faint spark that
was apparently floating across an unfathomable sea of darkness.

She seemed to see this through black darkness, and behind it a swarm of
stars of all sizes and colours. They appeared very much more wonderful
and glorious and important than the little spray of white smoke, because
she hadn't yet the faintest conception of its true import to her and
every other human being on earth: but she was very soon to know now.

While she was watching it in breathless silence, in which the clicking
of the mechanism which kept the great telescope moving so as to exactly
counteract the motion of the machinery of the Universe, sounded like the
blows of a sledge-hammer on an anvil, Gilbert Lennard stood beside her,
wondering if he should begin to tell her, and what he should say.

At last she turned away from the eye-piece, and looked at him with
something like a scared expression in her eyes, and said:

"It's very wonderful, isn't it, that one should be able to see all that
just by looking into a little bit of a hole in a telescope? And you tell
me that all those great big bright stars around your comet are so far
away that if you look at them just with your own eyes you don't even see
them--and there they look almost as if you could put out your hand and
touch them. It's just a little bit awful, too!" she added, with a little
shiver.

"Yes," he said, speaking slowly and even more gravely that she thought
the subject warranted, "yes, it is both wonderful and, in a way, awful.
Do you know that some of those stars you have seen in there are so far
away that the light which you see them by may have left them when
Solomon was king in Jerusalem? They may be quite dead and dark now, or
reduced into fire-mist by collision with some other star. And then,
perhaps, there are others behind them again so far away that their light
has not even reached us yet, and may never do while there are human eyes
on earth to see it."

"Yes, I know," she said, smiling. "You don't forget that I have been to
college--and light travels about a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles
a second, doesn't it? But come, Mr Lennard, aren't you what they call
stretching the probabilities a little when you say that the light of
some of them will never get here, as far as we're concerned? I always
thought we had a few million years of life to look forward to before
this old world of ours gets worn o