llow me to
rent it of you for a time, Lady Constantine?'

'You have taken it, whether I allow it or not. However, in the interests
of science it is advisable that you continue your tenancy. Nobody knows
you are here, I suppose?'

'Hardly anybody.'

He then took her down a few steps into the interior, and showed her some
ingenious contrivances for stowing articles away.

'Nobody ever comes near the column,--or, as it's called here, Rings-Hill
Speer,' he continued; 'and when I first came up it nobody had been here
for thirty or forty years. The staircase was choked with daws' nests and
feathers, but I cleared them out.'

'I understood the column was always kept locked?'

'Yes, it has been so. When it was built, in 1782, the key was given to
my great-grandfather, to keep by him in case visitors should happen to
want it. He lived just down there where I live now.'

He denoted by a nod a little dell lying immediately beyond the ploughed
land which environed them.

'He kept it in his bureau, and as the bureau descended to my grandfather,
my mother, and myself, the key descended with it. After the first thirty
or forty years, nobody ever asked for it. One day I saw it, lying rusty
in its niche, and, finding that it belonged to this column, I took it and
came up. I stayed here till it was dark, and the stars came out, and
that night I resolved to be an astronomer. I came back here from school
several months ago, and I mean to be an astronomer still.'

He lowered his voice, and added:

'I aim at nothing less than the dignity and office of Astronomer Royal,
if I live. Perhaps I shall not live.'

'I don't see why you should suppose that,' said she. 'How long are you
going to make this your observatory?'

'About a year longer--till I have obtained a practical familiarity with
the heavens. Ah, if I only had a good equatorial!'

'What is that?'

'A proper instrument for my pursuit. But time is short, and science is
infinite,--how infinite only those who study astronomy fully realize,--and
perhaps I shall be worn out before I make my mark.'

She seemed to be greatly struck by the odd mixture in him of scientific
earnestness and melancholy mistrust of all things human. Perhaps it was
owing to the nature of his studies.

'You are often on this tower alone at night?' she said.

'Yes; at this time of the year particularly, and while there is no moon.
I observe from seven or eight till about two in the mo