ut."

"There are other ends possible for this world besides wearing out, Miss
Parmenter," he answered, this time almost solemnly. "Other worlds have,
as I say, been reduced to fire-mist. Some have been shattered to tiny
fragments to make asteroids and meteorites--stars and worlds, in
comparison with which this bit of a planet of ours is nothing more than
a speck of sand, a mere atom of matter drifting over the wilderness of
immensity. In fact, such a trifle is it in the organism of the Universe,
that if some celestial body collided with it--say a comet with a
sufficiently solid nucleus--and the heat developed by the impact turned
it into a mass of blazing gas, an astronomer on Neptune, one of our own
planets, wouldn't even notice the accident, unless he happened to be
watching the earth through a powerful telescope at the time."

"And is such an accident, as you call it, possible, Mr Lennard?" she
asked, jumping womanlike, by a sort of unconscious intuition, to the
very point to which he was so clumsily trying to lead up.

"I thought you spoke rather queerly about this comet of yours at
breakfast this morning. I hope there isn't any chance of its getting on
to the same track as this terrestrial locomotive of ours. That would be
just awful, wouldn't it? Why, what's the matter? You are going to be
ill, I know. You had better get down to the house, and go to bed. It's
want of sleep, isn't it? You'll be driving yourself mad that way."

A sudden and terrible change had come over him while she was speaking.
It was only for the moment, and yet to him it was an eternity. It might,
as she said, have been the want of sleep, for insomnia plays strange
tricks sometimes with the strongest of intellects.

More probably, it might have been the horror of his secret working on
the great love that he had for this girl who was sitting there alone
with him in the silence of that dim room and in the midst of the glories
and the mysteries of the Universe.

His eyes had grown fixed and staring, and looked sightlessly at her, and
his face shone ghastly pale in the dim light of the solitary shaded
lamp. Certainly, one of those mysterious crises which are among the
unsolved secrets of psychology had come upon him like some swift access
of delirium.

He no longer saw her sitting there by the telescope, calm, gracious, and
beautiful. He saw her as, by his pitiless calculations, he must do that
day thirteen months to come--with her soft grey