And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watchers on hilly slopes, on house-roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward for the rising of the great new star.  It rose with a white glow in front of it, like the glare of a white fire, and those who had seen it come into existence the night before cried out at the sight of it.  “It is larger,” they cried.  “It is brighter!” And, indeed the moon a quarter full and sinking in the west was in its apparent size beyond comparison, but scarcely in all its breadth had it as much brightness now as the little circle of the strange new star.

“It is brighter!” cried the people clustering in the streets.  But in the dim observatories the watchers held their breath and peered at one another. “It is nearer,” they said. “Nearer!”

And voice after voice repeated, “It is nearer,” and the clicking telegraph took that up, and it trembled along telephone wires, and in a thousand cities grimy compositors fingered the type.  “It is nearer.”  Men writing in offices, struck with a strange realisation, flung down their pens, men talking in a thousand places suddenly came upon a grotesque possibility in those words, “It is nearer.”  It hurried along wakening streets, it was shouted down the frost-stilled ways of quiet villages; men who had read these things from the throbbing tape stood in yellow-lit doorways shouting the news to the passersby.  “It is nearer.”  Pretty women, flushed and glittering, heard the news told jestingly between the dances, and feigned an intelligent interest they did not feel.  “Nearer!  Indeed.  How curious!  How very, very clever people must be to find out things like that!”

Lonely tramps faring through the wintry night murmured those words to comfort themselves—­looking skyward.  “It has need to be nearer, for the night’s as cold as charity.  Don’t seem much warmth from it if it is nearer, all the same.”

“What is a new star to me?” cried the weeping woman kneeling beside her dead.

The schoolboy, rising early for his examination work, puzzled it out for himself—­with the great white star shining broad and bright through the frost-flowers of his window.  “Centrifugal, centripetal,” he said, with his chin on his fist.  “Stop a planet in its flight, rob it of its centrifugal force, what then?  Centripetal has it, and down it falls into the sun!  And this—!

“Do we come in the way?  I wonder—­”

The light of that day went the way of its brethren, and with the later watches of the frosty darkness rose the strange star again.  And it was now so bright that the waxing moon seemed but a pale yellow ghost of itself, hanging huge in the sunset.  In a South African City a great man had married, and the streets were alight to welcome his return with his bride.  “Even the skies have illuminated,” said the flatterer.  Under Capricorn, two negro lovers, daring the wild beasts and evil spirits, for love of one another, crouched together in a cane brake where the fire-flies hovered.  “That is our star,” they whispered, and felt strangely comforted by the sweet brilliance of its light.