—­No, indeed,—­she answered, and blushed, and felt ashamed because she had said indeed, as if it had been an emotional recollection.

The double-star allusion struck another dead silence.  She would have given a week’s pay to any invisible attendant that would have cut her stay-lace.

At last:  Do you know the story of Andromeda? he said.

—­Perhaps I did once, but suppose I don’t remember it.

He told her the story of the unfortunate maiden chained to a rock and waiting for a sea-beast that was coming to devour her, and how Perseus came and set her free, and won her love with her life.  And then he began something about a young man chained to his rock, which was a star-gazer’s tower, a prey by turns to ambition, and lonely self-contempt and unwholesome scorn of the life he looked down upon after the serenity of the firmament, and endless questionings that led him nowhere,—­and now he had only one more question to ask.  He loved her.  Would she break his chain?—­He held both his hands out towards her, the palms together, as if they were fettered at the wrists.  She took hold of them very gently; parted them a little; then wider—­wider—­and found herself all at once folded, unresisting, in her lover’s arms.

So there was a new double-star in the living firmament.  The constellations seemed to kindle with new splendors as the student and the story-teller walked homeward in their light; Alioth and Algol looked down on them as on the first pair of lovers they shone over, and the autumn air seemed full of harmonies as when the morning stars sang together.

XII

The old Master had asked us, the Young Astronomer and myself, into his library, to hear him read some passages from his interleaved book.  We three had formed a kind of little club without knowing it from the time when the young man began reading those extracts from his poetical reveries which I have reproduced in these pages.  Perhaps we agreed in too many things,—­I suppose if we could have had a good hard-headed, old-fashioned New England divine to meet with us it might have acted as a wholesome corrective.  For we had it all our own way; the Lady’s kindly remonstrance was taken in good part, but did not keep us from talking pretty freely, and as for the Young Girl, she listened with the tranquillity and fearlessness which a very simple trusting creed naturally gives those who hold it.  The fewer outworks to the citadel of belief, the fewer points there are to be threatened and endangered.

The reader must not suppose that I even attempt to reproduce everything exactly as it took place in our conversations, or when we met to listen to the Master’s prose or to the Young Astronomer’s verse.  I do not pretend to give all the pauses and interruptions by question or otherwise.  I could not always do it if I tried, but I do not want to, for oftentimes it is better to let the speaker or reader go on continuously, although there may have been many breaks in the course of the conversation or reading.  When, for instance, I by and by reproduce what the Landlady said to us, I shall give it almost without any hint that it was arrested in its flow from time to time by various expressions on the part of the hearers.