e 'seeing' is poor to-night," said Evarts, the younger man. "The
upper air is full of striae and, though it seems like a clear night,
everything looks dim--a volcanic haze probably. Perhaps the Aleutian
Islands are in eruption again."

"Very likely," answered Thornton, the elder astronomer. "The shocks this
afternoon would indicate something of the sort."

"Curious performance of the magnetic needle. They say it held due east
for several minutes," continued Evarts, hoping to engage his senior in
conversation--almost an impossibility, as he well knew.

Thornton did not reply. He was carefully observing the infinitesimal
approach of a certain star to the meridian line, marked by a thread
across the circle's aperture. When that point of light should cross the
thread it would be midnight, and July 22, 1916, would be gone forever.
Every midnight the indicating stars crossed the thread exactly on time,
each night a trifle earlier than the night before by a definite and
calculable amount, due to the march of the earth around the sun. So they
had crossed the lines in every observatory since clocks and telescopes
had been invented. Heretofore, no matter what cataclysm of nature had
occurred, the star had always crossed the line not a second too soon or
a second too late, but exactly on time. It was the one positively
predictable thing, foretellable for ten or for ten thousand years by a
simple mathematical calculation. It was surer than death or the tax-man.
It was absolute.

Thornton was a reserved man of few words--impersonal, methodical,
serious. He spent many nights there with Evarts, hardly exchanging a
phrase with him, and then only on some matter immediately concerned with
their work. Evarts could dimly see his long, grave profile bending over
his eyepiece, shrouded in the heavy shadows across the table. He felt a
great respect, even tenderness, for this taciturn, high-principled,
devoted scientist. He had never seen him excited, hardly ever aroused.
He was a man of figures, whose only passion seemed to be the "music of
the spheres."

A long silence followed, during which Thornton seemed to bend more
intently than ever over his eyepiece. The hand of the big clock slipped
gradually to midnight.

"There's something wrong with the clock," said Thornton suddenly, and
his voice sounded curiously dry, almost unnatural. "Telephone to the
equatorial room for the time."

Puzzled by Thornton's manner Evarts did as instructe