I am sure, I sympathize with her in this instance.  To see a pale student burning away, like his own midnight lamp, with only dead men’s hands to hold, stretched out to him from the sepulchres of books, and dead men’s souls imploring him from their tablets to warm them over again just for a little while in a human consciousness, when all this time there are soft, warm, living hands that would ask nothing better than to bring the blood back into those cold thin fingers, and gently caressing natures that would wind all their tendrils about the unawakened heart which knows so little of itself, is pitiable enough and would be sadder still if we did not have the feeling that sooner or later the pale student will be pretty sure to feel the breath of a young girl against his cheek as she looks over his shoulder; and that he will come all at once to an illuminated page in his book that never writer traced in characters, and never printer set up in type, and never binder enclosed within his covers!  But our young man seems farther away from life than any student whose head is bent downwards over his books.  His eyes are turned away from all human things.  How cold the moonlight is that falls upon his forehead, and how white he looks in it!  Will not the rays strike through to his brain at last, and send him to a narrower cell than this egg-shell dome which is his workshop and his prison?

I cannot say that the Young Astronomer seemed particularly impressed with a sense of his miserable condition.  He said he was lonely, it is true, but he said it in a manly tone, and not as if he were repining at the inevitable condition of his devoting himself to that particular branch of science.  Of course, he is lonely, the most lonely being that lives in the midst of our breathing world.  If he would only stay a little longer with us when we get talking; but he is busy almost always either in observation or with his calculations and studies, and when the nights are fair loses so much sleep that he must make it up by day.  He wants contact with human beings.  I wish he would change his seat and come round and sit by our Scheherezade!

The rest of the visit went off well enough, except that the “Man of Letters,” so called, rather snubbed some of the heavenly bodies as not quite up to his standard of brilliancy.  I thought myself that the double-star episode was the best part of it.

I have an unexpected revelation to make to the reader.  Not long after our visit to the Observatory, the Young Astronomer put a package into my hands, a manuscript, evidently, which he said he would like to have me glance over.  I found something in it which interested me, and told him the next day that I should like to read it with some care.  He seemed rather pleased at this, and said that he wished I would criticise it as roughly as I liked, and if I saw anything in it which might be dressed to better advantage to treat it freely, just as if it were my own production.