at one
another. "_It is nearer_," they said. "_Nearer!_"

And voice after voice repeated, "It is nearer," and the clicking
telegraph took that up, and it trembled along telephone wires, and in a
thousand cities grimy compositors fingered the type. "It is nearer." Men
writing in offices, struck with a strange realisation, flung down their
pens, men talking in a thousand places suddenly came upon a grotesque
possibility in those words, "It is nearer." It hurried along awakening
streets, it was shouted down the frost-stilled ways of quiet villages,
men who had read these things from the throbbing tape stood in
yellow-lit doorways shouting the news to the passers-by. "It is nearer."
Pretty women, flushed and glittering, heard the news told jestingly
between the dances, and feigned an intelligent interest they did not
feel. "Nearer! Indeed. How curious! How very, very clever people must be
to find out things like that!"

Lonely tramps faring through the wintry night murmured those words to
comfort themselves--looking skyward. "It has need to be nearer, for the
night's as cold as charity. Don't seem much warmth from it if it _is_
nearer, all the same."

"What is a new star to me?" cried the weeping woman kneeling beside her
dead.

The schoolboy, rising early for his examination work, puzzled it out for
himself--with the great white star, shining broad and bright through the
frost-flowers of his window. "Centrifugal, centripetal," he said, with
his chin on his fist. "Stop a planet in its flight, rob it of its
centrifugal force, what then? Centripetal has it, and down it falls into
the sun! And this--!"

"Do _we_ come in the way? I wonder--"

The light of that day went the way of its brethren, and with the later
watches of the frosty darkness rose the strange star again. And it was
now so bright that the waxing moon seemed but a pale yellow ghost of
itself, hanging huge in the sunset. In a South African city a great man
had married, and the streets were alight to welcome his return with his
bride. "Even the skies have illuminated," said the flatterer. Under
Capricorn, two negro lovers, daring the wild beasts and evil spirits,
for love of one another, crouched together in a cane brake where the
fire-flies hovered. "That is our star," they whispered, and felt
strangely comforted by the sweet brilliance of its light.

The master mathematician sat in his private room and pushed the papers
from him. His calculations were al