help of a very precise article in The Heavens, a little monthly
magazine that catered for those who were under this obsession, he
had at last got his opera-glass upon the new visitor to our system
from outer space. He gazed in a sort of rapture upon that quivering
little smudge of light among the shining pin-points--and gazed. My
troubles had to wait for him.

"Wonderful," he sighed, and then as though his first emphasis did
not satisfy him, "wonderful!"

He turned to me. "Wouldn't you like to see?"

I had to look, and then I had to listen, how that this scarce-visible
intruder was to be, was presently to be, one of the largest comets
this world has ever seen, how that its course must bring it within
at most--so many score of millions of miles from the earth, a mere
step, Parload seemed to think that; how that the spectroscope was
already sounding its chemical secrets, perplexed by the unprecedented
band in the green, how it was even now being photographed in the
very act of unwinding--in an unusual direction--a sunward tail
(which presently it wound up again), and all the while in a sort
of undertow I was thinking first of Nettie Stuart and the letter
she had just written me, and then of old Rawdon's detestable face
as I had seen it that afternoon. Now I planned answers to Nettie
and now belated repartees to my employer, and then again "Nettie"
was blazing all across the background of my thoughts. . . .

Nettie Stuart was daughter of the head gardener of the rich Mr.
Verrall's widow, and she and I had kissed and become sweethearts
before we were eighteen years old. My mother and hers were second