There must be some fatality which carries our young men and maidens in the direction of the Common when they have anything very particular to exchange their views about.  At any rate I remember two of our young friends brought up here a good many years ago, and I understand that there is one path across the enclosure which a young man must not ask a young woman to take with him unless he means business, for an action will hold—­for breach of promise, if she consents to accompany him, and he chooses to forget his obligations: 

Our two young people stood at the western edge of the little pool, studying astronomy in the reflected firmament.  The Pleiades were trembling in the wave before them, and the three great stars of Orion,—­for these constellations were both glittering in the eastern sky.

“There is no place too humble for the glories of heaven to shine in,” she said.

“And their splendor makes even this little pool beautiful and noble,” he answered.  “Where is the light to come from that is to do as much for our poor human lives?”

A simple question enough, but the young girl felt her color change as she answered, “From friendship, I think.”

—­Grazing only as-yet,—­not striking full, hardly hitting at all,—­but there are questions and answers that come so very near, the wind of them alone almost takes the breath away.

There was an interval of silence.  Two young persons can stand looking at water for a long time without feeling the necessity of speaking.  Especially when the water is alive with stars and the young persons are thoughtful and impressible.  The water seems to do half the thinking while one is looking at it; its movements are felt in the brain very much like thought.  When I was in full training as a flaneur, I could stand on the Pont Neuf with the other experts in the great science of passive cerebration and look at the river for half an hour with so little mental articulation that when I moved on it seemed as if my thinking-marrow had been asleep and was just waking up refreshed after its nap.

So the reader can easily account for the interval of silence.  It is hard to tell how long it would have lasted, but just then a lubberly intrusive boy threw a great stone, which convulsed the firmament, the one at their feet, I mean.  The six Pleiads disappeared as if in search of their lost sister; the belt of Orion was broken asunder, and a hundred worlds dissolved back into chaos.  They turned away and strayed off into one of the more open paths, where the view of the sky over them was unobstructed.  For some reason or other the astronomical lesson did not get on very fast this evening.

Presently the young man asked his pupil: 

—­Do you know what the constellation directly over our heads is?

—­Is it not Cassiopea?—­she asked a little hesitatingly.

—­No, it is Andromeda.  You ought not to have forgotten her, for I remember showing you a double star, the one in her right foot, through the equatorial telescope.  You have not forgotten the double star,—­the two that shone for each other and made a little world by themselves?