was new to us all; so that we listened as to some new and strange being from a new and strange world.  Her father’s face was full of delight.  I knew now its cause.  I understood the happiness that had come into his life, on his return to the world that he knew, from that prolonged sojourn in the world of dreams.  To find in his daughter, whose nature he had never till now known, such a wealth of affection, such a splendour of spiritual insight, such a scholarly imagination, such . . .  The rest of his feeling was of hope!

The two other men were silent unconsciously.  One man had had his dreaming; for the other, his dreams were to come.

For myself, I was like one in a trance.  Who was this new, radiant being who had won to existence out of the mist and darkness of our fears?  Love has divine possibilities for the lover’s heart!  The wings of the soul may expand at any time from the shoulders of the loved one, who then may sweep into angel form.  I knew that in my Margaret’s nature were divine possibilities of many kinds.  When under the shade of the overhanging willow-tree on the river, I had gazed into the depths of her beautiful eyes, I had thenceforth a strict belief in the manifold beauties and excellences of her nature; but this soaring and understanding spirit was, indeed, a revelation.  My pride, like her father’s, was outside myself; my joy and rapture were complete and supreme!

When we had all got back to earth again in our various ways, Mr. Trelawny, holding his daughter’s hand in his, went on with his discourse: 

“Now, as to the time at which Queen Tera intended her resurrection to take place!  We are in contact with some of the higher astronomical calculations in connection with true orientation.  As you know, the stars shift their relative positions in the heavens; but though the real distances traversed are beyond all ordinary comprehension, the effects as we see them are small.  Nevertheless, they are susceptible of measurement, not by years, indeed, but by centuries.  It was by this means that Sir John Herschel arrived at the date of the building of the Great Pyramid—­a date fixed by the time necessary to change the star of the true north from Draconis to the Pole Star, and since then verified by later discoveries.  From the above there can be no doubt whatever that astronomy was an exact science with the Egyptians at least a thousand years before the time of Queen Tera.  Now, the stars that go to make up a constellation change in process of time their relative positions, and the Plough is a notable example.  The changes in the position of stars in even forty centuries is so small as to be hardly noticeable by an eye not trained to minute observances, but they can be measured and verified.  Did you, or any of you, notice how exactly the stars in the Ruby correspond to the position of the stars in the Plough; or how the same holds with regard to the translucent places in the Magic Coffer?”