sayings,
looks, compliments, gestures, which had marked their intercourse during
the last day or two. He had been annoyed because a box, containing some
clothes specially chosen by him for her to wear, had been taken to the
wrong station, owing to her neglect in the matter of labels. The box had
arrived in the nick of time, and he had remarked, as she came downstairs
on the first night, that he had never seen her look more beautiful. She
outshone all her cousins. He had discovered that she never made an ugly
movement; he also said that the shape of her head made it possible for
her, unlike most women, to wear her hair low. He had twice reproved
her for being silent at dinner; and once for never attending to what he
said. He had been surprised at the excellence of her French accent, but
he thought it was selfish of her not to go with her mother to call
upon the Middletons, because they were old family friends and very nice
people. On the whole, the balance was nearly even; and, writing down a
kind of conclusion in her mind which finished the sum for the present,
at least, she changed the focus of her eyes, and saw nothing but the
stars.

To-night they seemed fixed with unusual firmness in the blue, and
flashed back such a ripple of light into her eyes that she found herself
thinking that to-night the stars were happy. Without knowing or caring
more for Church practices than most people of her age, Katharine could
not look into the sky at Christmas time without feeling that, at this
one season, the Heavens bend over the earth with sympathy, and signal
with immortal radiance that they, too, take part in her festival.
Somehow, it seemed to her that they were even now beholding the
procession of kings and wise men upon some road on a distant part of
the earth. And yet, after gazing for another second, the stars did their
usual work upon the mind, froze to cinders the whole of our short
human history, and reduced the human body to an ape-like, furry form,
crouching amid the brushwood of a barbarous clod of mud. This stage was
soon succeeded by another, in which there was nothing in the universe
save stars and the light of stars; as she looked up the pupils of her
eyes so dilated with starlight that the whole of her seemed dissolved
in silver and spilt over the ledges of the stars for ever and
ever indefinitely through space. Somehow simultaneously, though
incongruously, she was riding with the magnanimous hero upon the shore