“David, marry! Oh, pooh! David, wise man, has consecrated his youth to his pursuit. Pity, though, he did not choose a more satisfactory one!”

Mrs. Marvel lifted Belphegor from her shoulders to the floor and drew her chair closer.

“You mean his star-gazing? He sits in his tower all night, peering at the skies, ‘and dreams all day, like an owl.’ That’s what Willum said when I questioned him just now. Do you also call his a foolish pursuit?”

“He’s a visionary, a dreamer,” answered the other testily. “A splendid mind, the vigour of a young brain ... and to waste it on the stars, on distant worlds with which no telescope can ever bring him into any useful 25contact, from which no nights of study, were he to live as long as Methuselah, will ever enable him to gain one single grain heavy enough to weigh down that scale there, that scale which as you saw, will not even bear a breath unmoved! And all this world, child, all this world!” In his enthusiasm the old man had risen and now was pacing the room. “This teeming, inexhaustible world of ours, full of marvellous, most subtle secrets yet submissive to our investigation, from the mass that blocks out our horizon to the tiniest atom that, even beneath this glass,”—he was now by his work-table and his fingers caressed the microscope—“is scarce visible to the eye, all obedient to the same laws and amenable to our ken! With all these treasures at his hand, awaiting him, he throws away his life on the unattainable, on the stars, on moonshine!”

25

The faded dressing-gown flapped about the speaker’s lean legs as he walked; his white hair swung lightly over his bent shoulders.

Ellinor looked after him with eyes of amusement.

“The short of it,” said she, “is that he prefers his telescope to your microscope.”

“Fancy to fact, girl! Dreams to reality! Speculation to uses! Ah, what should we not have done, we two, had he been willing to work down here instead of up there!”

With a growl Master Simon returned to his sweet-smelling furnace and began mechanically to feed the fires with charcoal. She heard him mutter, as if to himself:

“Work with me? Why, I hardly ever even see him! David’s a ghost, rather than a man—a ghost that rises with the evening shades and disappears at dawn; that never speaks unless you charge him!”

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