the windows of the Great House each morning for
a sight of his figure hastening down the glade.

But he did not come.

A long array of wet days passed their dreary shapes before her, and made
the waiting still more tedious. On one of these occasions she ran across
to the tower, at the risk of a severe cold. The door was locked.

Two days after she went again. The door was locked still. But this was
only to be expected in such weather. Yet she would have gone on to his
house, had there not been one reason too many against such precipitancy.
As astronomer and astronomer there was no harm in their meetings; but as
woman and man she feared them.

Ten days passed without a sight of him; ten blurred and dreary days,
during which the whole landscape dripped like a mop; the park trees
swabbed the gravel from the drive, while the sky was a zinc-coloured
archi-vault of immovable cloud. It seemed as if the whole science of
astronomy had never been real, and that the heavenly bodies, with their
motions, were as theoretical as the lines and circles of a bygone
mathematical problem.

She could content herself no longer with fruitless visits to the column,
and when the rain had a little abated she walked to the nearest hamlet,
and in a conversation with the first old woman she met contrived to lead
up to the subject of Swithin St. Cleeve by talking about his grandmother.

'Ah, poor old heart; 'tis a bad time for her, my lady!' exclaimed the
dame.

'What?'

'Her grandson is dying; and such a gentleman through and through!'

'What! . . . Oh, it has something to do with that dreadful discovery!'

'Discovery, my lady?'

She left the old woman with an evasive answer, and with a breaking heart
crept along the road. Tears brimmed into her eyes as she walked, and by
the time that she was out of sight sobs burst forth tumultuously.

'I am too fond of him!' she moaned; 'but I can't help it; and I don't
care if it's wrong,--I don't care!'

Without further considerations as to who beheld her doings she
instinctively went straight towards Mrs. Martin's. Seeing a man coming
she calmed herself sufficiently to ask him through her dropped veil how
poor Mr. St. Cleeve was that day. But she only got the same reply: 'They
say he is dying, my lady.'

When Swithin had parted from Lady Constantine, on the previous
Ash-Wednesday, he had gone straight to the homestead and prepared his
account of 'A New Astronomical Discovery.' It w