I CANNOT now remember (the story resumed), what interval separated
that evening on which Parload first showed me the comet--I think
I only pretended to see it then--and the Sunday afternoon I spent
at Checkshill.

Between the two there was time enough for me to give notice and
leave Rawdon's, to seek for some other situation very strenuously
in vain, to think and say many hard and violent things to my mother
and to Parload, and to pass through some phases of very profound
wretchedness. There must have been a passionate correspondence
with Nettie, but all the froth and fury of that has faded now out
of my memory. All I have clear now is that I wrote one magnificent
farewell to her, casting her off forever, and that I got in reply
a prim little note to say, that even if there was to be an end to
everything, that was no excuse for writing such things as I had done,
and then I think I wrote again in a vein I considered satirical.
To that she did not reply. That interval was at least three weeks,
and probably four, because the comet which had been on the first
occasion only a dubious speck in the sky, certainly visible only
when it was magnified, was now a great white presence, brighter
than Jupiter, and casting a shadow on its own account. It was
now actively present in the world of human thought, every one was
talking about it, every one was looking for its waxing splendor
as the sun went down--the papers, the music-halls, the hoardings,
echoed it.

Yes; the comet was already dominant before I went over to make
everything clear to Nettie. And Parload had spent two hoarded pounds
in buying himself a spectroscope, so that he could see for himself,
night after night, that mysterious, that stimulating line--the