utiful and noble," he
answered. "Where is the light to come from that is to do as much for our
poor human lives?"

A simple question enough, but the young girl felt her color change as
she answered, "From friendship, I think."

--Grazing only as-yet,--not striking full, hardly hitting at all,--but
there are questions and answers that come so very near, the wind of them
alone almost takes the breath away.

There was an interval of silence. Two young persons can stand looking
at water for a long time without feeling the necessity of speaking.
Especially when the water is alive with stars and the young persons
are thoughtful and impressible. The water seems to do half the thinking
while one is looking at it; its movements are felt in the brain very
much like thought. When I was in full training as a flaneur, I could
stand on the Pont Neuf with the other experts in the great science
of passive cerebration and look at the river for half an hour with
so little mental articulation that when I moved on it seemed as if my
thinking-marrow had been asleep and was just waking up refreshed after
its nap.

So the reader can easily account for the interval of silence. It is
hard to tell how long it would have lasted, but just then a lubberly
intrusive boy threw a great stone, which convulsed the firmament, the
one at their feet, I mean. The six Pleiads disappeared as if in search
of their lost sister; the belt of Orion was broken asunder, and a
hundred worlds dissolved back into chaos. They turned away and strayed
off into one of the more open paths, where the view of the sky over them
was unobstructed. For some reason or other the astronomical lesson did
not get on very fast this evening.

Presently the young man asked his pupil:

--Do you know what the constellation directly over our heads is?

--Is it not Cassiopea?--she asked a little hesitatingly.

--No, it is Andromeda. You ought not to have forgotten her, for I
remember showing you a double star, the one in her right foot, through
the equatorial telescope. You have not forgotten the double star,--the
two that shone for each other and made a little world by themselves?

--No, indeed,--she answered, and blushed, and felt ashamed because she
had said indeed, as if it had been an emotional recollection.

The double-star allusion struck another dead silence. She would have
given a week's pay to any invisible attendant that would have cut her
stay-lace.

At last: Do you