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It was a few months after this that my father, returning from a climb in the neighboring hills, complained of great weariness and a sort of mild vertigo.  I had become exceedingly endeared to him.  I found him a most unusual companion, and unnaturally separated as I had been from more ordinary associations, our lives had assumed an almost fraternal tenderness.

I was greatly troubled to see my father’s illness, and begged him to take rest; indeed, to leave the observatory for a while; to visit Christ Church.  We had made some very congenial acquaintances in Christ Church.  A family of Tontines and a gentleman and his daughter by the name of Dodan had often visited us, and while we had become somewhat a subject of perennial curiosity, and were more or less visited by curiosity hunters and others, actuated by more intelligent motives, the Tontines and the Dodans remained our only very intimate friends.

Indeed, Miss Dodan had come to me, buried in scientific speculations and denied hitherto all female acquaintances, like a beam of light through a sky not at all dark, but gray and pensive and sometimes almost irksome.  Miss Katharine Dodan was gentle, pretty, and unaffectedly enthusiastic.  Her interest in all equipment of our laboratories was boundless.  When I found myself alone with her at the big telescope adjusting everything with—­oh! such exquisite precision—­and then sometimes discovered my hand resting upon hers, or my head touching those silken brown curves of hair that framed her white brow and reddening cheeks, the throbbing pleasure was so sweet, so unexpected, so strange, that I felt a new desire rise in my heart, and the newness of life lifted me for a moment out of myself, and started those fires of ambition and hope that only a lovely woman can awaken in the heart of a man.  I mention this circumstance that led to the fatal train of occurrences that led to my father’s death.

I urged my father to go to Christ Church and stay with the Dodans.  Mr. Dodan had frequently invited him, and Miss Dodan’s brightness and her cheerful art at the piano would, I know, cheer him, inured too long to his lonely life, subject to the periodic returns of that bitter sadness, which was now only accentuated by his self-imposed exile from the home and scenes of his former happiness.

He at last consented, and in October, 1891, accompanied by the Dodans, whom he had summoned from Christ Church, he went down the steep hillside that slanted from our plateau to the lowlands, and was soon lost from view in a turn of the road, which also robbed me of the sight of a waving, small white handkerchief, floating in front of a half-loosened pile of chestnut hair.

A few days later I received a visit from Miss Dodan.  I was then working at some photographs in the dark room.  My assistant told me of her arrival.  I hurried to our little reception room and library, where a few of my father’s “Worthies of Science” decorated the walls, which for the most part were covered with irregular book cases, while a long square covered table occupied the center of the room, littered with charts, maps, journals and daily papers.