from the earth to Uranus and the mysterious outskirts of the solar
system; from the solar system to a star in the Swan, the nearest
fixed star in the northern sky; from the star in the Swan to remoter
stars; thence to the remotest visible; till the ghastly chasm which
they had bridged by a fragile line of sight was realized by Lady
Constantine.

'We are now traversing distances beside which the immense line
stretching from the earth to the sun is but an invisible point,'
said the youth. 'When, just now, we had reached a planet whose
remoteness is a hundred times the remoteness of the sun from the
earth, we were only a two thousandth part of the journey to the spot
at which we have optically arrived now.'

'Oh, pray don't; it overpowers me!' she replied, not without
seriousness. 'It makes me feel that it is not worth while to live;
it quite annihilates me.'

'If it annihilates your ladyship to roam over these yawning spaces
just once, think how it must annihilate me to be, as it were, in
constant suspension amid them night after night.'

'Yes. . . . It was not really this subject that I came to see you
upon, Mr. St. Cleeve,' she began a second time. 'It was a personal
matter.'

'I am listening, Lady Constantine.'

'I will tell it you. Yet no,--not this moment. Let us finish this
grand subject first; it dwarfs mine.'