“I fancy the clouds overhead are the real earth,” explained the astronomer, “and that I’m looking down into the starry heavens, with its Milky Way.  I say, though, isn’t it jolly up here—­soaring above all these moiling mannikins below—­wasting their precious lives grubbing in the mire—­dead to the glories of the universe—­seeking happiness and finding misery.  Ugh!—­wish I had a packet of dynamite to drop amongst them and make them look up.  Hallo!”

The earth had suddenly vanished from our sight.

CHAPTER VI.

IN SPACE.

We had entered the clouds.

For half-an-hour we were muffled in a cold, damp mist, and total darkness, and had begun to think of going indoors when, all at once, the car burst into the pure and starlit region of the upper air.

A cry of joyous admiration escaped from us all.

The spectacle before us was indeed sublime.

The sky of a deep dark blue was hung with innumerable stars, which seemed to float in the limpid ether, and the rolling vapours through which we had passed were drawn like a sable curtain between us and the lower world.  The stillness was so profound that we could hear the beating of our own hearts.

“How beautiful!” exclaimed Miss Carmichael, in a solemn whisper, as if she were afraid that angels might hear.

“There is Venus right ahead,” cried the astronomer, but in a softer tone than usual, perhaps out of respect for the sovereign laws of the universe.  “The course is clear now—­we are fairly on the open sea—­I mean the open ether.  I must get out my telescope.”

“The sky does not look sad here, as it always does on the earth—­to me at least,” whispered Miss Carmichael, after Gazen had left us alone.  “I suppose that is because there is so much sadness around us and within us there.”

“The atmosphere, too, is often very impure,” I replied, also in a whisper.

“Up here I enjoy a sense of absolute peace and well-being, if not happiness,” she murmured.  “I feel raised above all the miseries of life—­they appear to me so paltry and so vain.”

“As when we reach a higher moral elevation,” said I, drifting into a confidential mood, like passengers on the deck of a ship, under the mysterious glamour of the night-sky.  “Such moments are too rare in life.  Do you remember the lines of Shakespeare:—­

    “’Look, how the floor of heaven
      Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold: 
      There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st,
      But in his motion like an angel sings,
      Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims: 
      Such harmony is in immortal souls;
      But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
      Doth grossly close it in—­we cannot hear it.’”

“True,” responded Miss Carmichael, “and now I begin to feel like a disembodied spirit—­a ‘young-eyed cherubim.’  I seem to belong already to a better planet.  Should you not like to dwell here for ever, far away from the carking cares and troubles of the world?”