This fact had been shown quite conclusively by the enormous deflections that had at last swung it round squarely at our world.  It had passed near three of the smallest asteroids without producing the minutest perceptible deflection in their course; while, on its own part, it had described a course through nearly three degrees.  When it struck our earth there was to be a magnificent spectacle, no doubt, for those who were on the right side of our planet to see, but beyond that nothing.  It was doubtful whether we were on the right side.  The meteor would loom larger and larger in the sky, but with the umbra of our earth eating its heart of brightness out, and at last it would be the whole sky, a sky of luminous green clouds, with a white brightness about the horizon, west and east.  Then a pause—­a pause of not very exactly definite duration—­and then, no doubt, a great blaze of shooting stars.  They might be of some unwonted color because of the unknown element that line in the green revealed.  For a little while the zenith would spout shooting stars.  Some, it was hoped, would reach the earth and be available for analysis.

That, science said, would be all.  The green clouds would whirl and vanish, and there might be thunderstorms.  But through the attenuated wisps of comet shine, the old sky, the old stars, would reappear, and all would be as it had been before.  And since this was to happen between one and eleven in the morning of the approaching Tuesday—­I slept at Monkshampton on Saturday night,—­it would be only partially visible, if visible at all, on our side of the earth.  Perhaps, if it came late, one would see no more than a shooting star low down in the sky.  All this we had with the utmost assurances of science.  Still it did not prevent the last nights being the most beautiful and memorable of human experiences.

The nights had become very warm, and when next day I had ranged Shaphambury in vain, I was greatly tormented, as that unparalleled glory of the night returned, to think that under its splendid benediction young Verrall and Nettie made love to one another.

I walked backward and forward, backward and forward, along the sea front, peering into the faces of the young couples who promenaded, with my hand in my pocket ready, and a curious ache in my heart that had no kindred with rage.  Until at last all the promenaders had gone home to bed, and I was alone with the star.

My train from Wyvern to Shaphambury that morning was a whole hour late; they said it was on account of the movement of troops to meet a possible raid from the Elbe.

Section 2

Shaphambury seemed an odd place to me even then.  But something was quickening in me at that time to feel the oddness of many accepted things.  Now in the retrospect I see it as intensely queer.  The whole place was strange to my untraveled eyes; the sea even was strange.  Only twice in my life had I been at the seaside before, and then I had gone by excursion to places on the Welsh coast whose great cliffs of rock and mountain backgrounds made the effect of the horizon very different from what it is upon the East Anglian seaboard.  Here what they call a cliff was a crumbling bank of whitey-brown earth not fifty feet high.