Her wits must have been a good deal confused by the strange sights of the evening.  She had seen tickets marked complimentary, she remembered, but she could not for the life of her understand why our party should be particularly favored at a celestial exhibition like this.  On the whole, she questioned inwardly whether it might not be some subtle pleasantry, and smiled, experimentally, with a note of interrogation in the smile, but, finding no encouragement, allowed her features to subside gradually as if nothing had happened.  I saw all this as plainly as if it had all been printed in great-primer type, instead of working itself out in her features.  I like to see other people muddled now and then, because my own occasional dulness is relieved by a good solid background of stupidity in my neighbors.

—­And the two revolve round each other?—­said the Young Girl.

—­Yes,—­he answered,—­two suns, a greater and a less, each shining, but with a different light, for the other.

—­How charming!  It must be so much pleasanter than to be alone in such a great empty space!  I should think one would hardly care to shine if its light wasted itself in the monstrous solitude of the sky.  Does not a single star seem very lonely to you up there?

—­Not more lonely than I am myself,—­answered the Young Astronomer.

—­I don’t know what there was in those few words, but I noticed that for a minute or two after they, were uttered I heard the ticking of the clock-work that moved the telescope as clearly as if we had all been holding our breath, and listening for the music of the spheres.

The Young Girl kept her eye closely applied to the eye-piece of the telescope a very long time, it seemed to me.  Those double stars interested her a good deal, no doubt.  When she looked off from the glass I thought both her eyes appeared very much as if they had been a little strained, for they were suffused and glistening.  It may be that she pitied the lonely young man.

I know nothing in the world tenderer than the pity that a kind-hearted young girl has for a young man who feels lonely.  It is true that these dear creatures are all compassion for every form of human woe, and anxious to alleviate all human misfortunes.  They will go to Sunday-schools through storms their brothers are afraid of, to teach the most unpleasant and intractable classes of little children the age of Methuselah and the dimensions of Og the King of Bashan’s bedstead.  They will stand behind a table at a fair all day until they are ready to drop, dressed in their prettiest clothes and their sweetest smiles, and lay hands upon you, like—­so many Lady Potiphars,—­perfectly correct ones, of course,—­to make you buy what you do not want, at prices which you cannot afford; all this as cheerfully as if it were not martyrdom to them as well as to you.  Such is their love for all good objects, such their eagerness to sympathize with all their suffering fellow-creatures!  But there is nothing they pity as they pity a lonely young man.