eered at one another. "_It is nearer_," they said. "_Nearer!_"

And voice after voice repeated, "It is nearer," and the
clicking telegraph took that up, and it trembled along telephone
wires, and in a thousand cities grimy compositors fingered the
type. "It is nearer." Men writing in offices, struck with a
strange realisation, flung down their pens, men talking in a
thousand places suddenly came upon a grotesque possibility in
those words, "It is nearer." It hurried along wakening streets, it
was shouted down the frost-stilled ways of quiet villages; men who
had read these things from the throbbing tape stood in yellow-lit
doorways shouting the news to the passersby. "It is nearer."
Pretty women, flushed and glittering, heard the news told jestingly
between the dances, and feigned an intelligent interest they did
not feel. "Nearer! Indeed. How curious! How very, very clever
people must be to find out things like that!"

Lonely tramps faring through the wintry night murmured those
words to comfort themselves--looking skyward. "It has need to be
nearer, for the night's as cold as charity. Don't seem much warmth
from it if it _is_ nearer, all the same."

"What is a new star to me?" cried the weeping woman kneeling
beside her dead.

The schoolboy, rising early for his examination work, puzzled
it out for himself--with the great white star shining broad and
bright through the frost-flowers of his window. "Centrifugal,
centripetal," he said, with his chin on his fist. "Stop a planet
in its flight, rob it of its centrifugal force, what then?
Centripetal has it, and down it falls into the sun! And this--!

"Do _we_ come in the way? I wonder--"

The light of that day went the way of its brethren, and with
the later watches of the frosty darkness rose the strange star
again. And it was now so bright that the waxing moon seemed but a
pale yellow ghost of itself, hanging huge in the sunset. In a
South African City a great man had married, and the streets were
alight to welcome his return with his bride. "Even the skies have
illuminated," said the flatterer. Under Capricorn, two negro
lovers, daring the wild beasts and evil spirits, for love of one
another, crouched together in a cane brake where the fire-flies
hovered. "That is our star," they whispered, and felt strangely
comforted by the sweet brilliance of its light.

The master mathematician sat in his private room and pushed
the papers from him.