If the sky was clear, a portion of each evening was spent in the observatory, or out upon the balcony, as the company chose, and the great telescope was always in requisition, and always pointed to the Earth!—if the Earth was in sight.
The last evening I spent in Lunismar was such an one as I have described. Ariadne and I happened to be standing together, and alone, in a place upon the balcony which commanded a view of our world. It was particularly clear and brilliant that night, and you may imagine with what feelings I contemplated it, being about to return to it! We had been silent for some little time, when she turned her eyes to me—those wonderful eyes!—and said, a little sadly, I thought:
“I shall never look upon Earth again, without happy memories of your brief visit among us.”
A strange impulse seized me, and I caught her hands and held them fast in mine. “And I, O, Ariadne! when I return to Earth again, and lift my eyes toward heaven, it will not be Mars that I shall see, but only—Ariadne!”
A strange light suddenly flashed over her face and into her eyes as she raised them to mine, and in their clear depths was revealed to me the supreme law of the universe, the law of life, the law of love. In a voice tremulous with emotion—sad, but not hopeless—she murmured:
“And I, also, shall forget my studies in the starry fields of space to watch for your far-distant planet—the Earth—which shall forever touch all others with its glory.”
And there, under the stars, with the plaintive music of the Eudosa in our ears, and seeing dimly through the darkness the white finger of the snowy peaks pointing upward, we looked into each other’s eyes and—“I saw a new heaven and a new earth.”
The End.
