.'

'I am listening, Lady Constantine.'

'I will tell it you. Yet no,--not this moment. Let us finish this grand
subject first; it dwarfs mine.'

It would have been difficult to judge from her accents whether she were
afraid to broach her own matter, or really interested in his. Or a
certain youthful pride that he evidenced at being the elucidator of such
a large theme, and at having drawn her there to hear and observe it, may
have inclined her to indulge him for kindness' sake.

Thereupon he took exception to her use of the word 'grand' as descriptive
of the actual universe:

'The imaginary picture of the sky as the concavity of a dome whose base
extends from horizon to horizon of our earth is grand, simply grand, and
I wish I had never got beyond looking at it in that way. But the actual
sky is a horror.'

'A new view of our old friends, the stars,' she said, smiling up at them.

'But such an obviously true one!' said the young man. 'You would hardly
think, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be
discovered by any moderately penetrating mind--monsters to which those of
the oceans bear no sort of comparison.'

'What monsters may they be?'

'Impersonal monsters, namely, Immensities. Until a person has thought
out the stars and their inter-spaces, he has hardly learnt that there are
things much more terrible than monsters of shape, namely, monsters of
magnitude without known shape. Such monsters are the voids and waste
places of the sky. Look, for instance, at those pieces of darkness in
the Milky Way,' he went on, pointing with his finger to where the galaxy
stretched across over their heads with the luminousness of a frosted web.
'You see that dark opening in it near the Swan? There is a still more
remarkable one south of the equator, called the Coal Sack, as a sort of
nickname that has a farcical force from its very inadequacy. In these
our sight plunges quite beyond any twinkler we have yet visited. Those
are deep wells for the human mind to let itself down into, leave alone
the human body! and think of the side caverns and secondary abysses to
right and left as you pass on!'

Lady Constantine was heedful and silent.

He tried to give her yet another idea of the size of the universe; never
was there a more ardent endeavour to bring down the immeasurable to human
comprehension! By figures of speech and apt comparisons he took her mind
into leading-strings, compelling her to f