In the meantime Copernicus was too deeply absorbed in his calculations to notice these comings and goings. Apparently he had been led into the most abstruse mathematical regions. Nothing short of the triple integration of transcendental functions should have been adequate to produce those lines of anxious care in his face as he slowly covered sheet after sheet with figures.
He was at length startled from his preoccupation by a gentle voice at his side.
"Can't I help, Mr. Droop?"
It was Phœbe, who, having made all right in her room and washed all traces of tears from her face, had come to note Droop's progress.
Dazed, he raised his head and looked unexpectedly into a lovely face made the more attractive by an expression only given by a sense of duty unselfishly done.
"I—I wish'd you'd call me Cousin Copernicus," he said for the fifth time.
She picked up one of the sheets on which he had been scribbling as though she had not heard him, and said:
"Why, dear me! How comes it you have so much figurin' to do?"
"Well," he began, in a querulous tone, "it beats all creation how many things a feller has to work out at once! Ye see, I've got a rope forty foot long that's got to tie the Panchronicon to the North Pole while we swing 'round to cut meridians. Now, then, the question is, How many times an hour shall we swing 'round to get to 1892, an' how long's it goin' to take an' how fast must I make the old thing hum along?"
"But you said eighteen hours by the clock would do it."