black, invisible cinders of those stars... If you are cheerful, and wish to remain so, leave the study of astronomy alone. Of all the sciences, it alone deserves the character of the terrible.'
'I am not altogether cheerful.'
'Then if, on the other hand, you are restless and anxious about the future, study astronomy at once. Your troubles will be reduced amazingly. But your study will reduce them in a singular way, by reducing the importance of everything. So that the science is still terrible, even as a panacea. It is quite impossible to think at all adequately of the sky--of what the sky substantially is, without feeling it as a juxtaposed nightmare. It is better--far better--for men to forget the universe than to bear it clearly in mind!... But you say the universe was not really what you came to see me about. What was it, may I ask, Lady Constantine?'
She mused, and sighed, and turned to him with something pathetic in her.
'The immensity of the subject you have engaged me on has completely crushed my subject out of me! Yours is celestial; mine lamentably human! And the less must give way to the greater.'
'But is it, in a human sense, and apart from macrocosmic magnitudes, important?' he inquired, at last attracted by her manner; for he began to perceive, in spite of his prepossession, that she had really something on her mind.
'It is as important as personal troubles usually are.'
Notwithstanding her preconceived notion of coming to Swithin as employer to dependant, as chatelaine to page, she was falling into confidential intercourse with him. His vast and romantic endeavours lent him a personal force and charm which she could not but apprehend. In the presence of the immensities that his young mind had, as it were, brought down from above to hers, they became unconsciously equal. There was, moreover, an inborn liking in Lady Constantine to dwell less on her permanent position as a county lady than on her passing emotions as a woman.
'I will postpone the matter I came to charge you with,' she resumed, smiling. 'I must reconsider it. Now I will return.'
'Allow me to show you out through the trees and across the fields?'
She said neither a distinct yes nor no; and, descending the tower, they threaded the firs and crossed the ploughed field. By an odd coincidence he remarked, when they drew near the Great House--'You may possibly be interested in knowing, Lady Constantine, that that medium-sized star you see over there, low down in the south, is precisely over Sir Blount Constantine's head in the middle of Africa.'
'How very strange that you should have said so!' she answered. 'You have broached for me the very subject I had come to speak of.'
'On a domestic matter?' he said, with surprise.
'Yes. What a small matter it seems now, after our 

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