Leigh's knowledge of the lawyer's career enabled him to appreciate the sharpness of this remark, but Cobbens was more adroit than he could have thought possible in the face of such a taunt.
"Well, when that poor beggar tries to mount the political horse, he 'll get thrown so hard that he 'll never try it again."
Miss Wycliffe vouchsafed no reply, but turned toward the cabin, and they followed her in silence. During the subsequent session about the telescope, Leigh was not surprised to find that she domineered over her friends, or that they accepted her tyranny without question. In her self-appointed office of the instructor's assistant, she gave this one or that the chair, until the young astronomer thought it high time to protest.
"I insist upon your taking a look yourself," he said. "I have something of peculiar interest reserved for you." And he trained the instrument upon Castor, in the constellation of the Twins. She took the chair and looked for a tantalising length of time in silence, while with one hand she waved off the questions and impatience of the others. He bent over her, almost oblivious of their presence. "It's a double star, you see. What do you think of it?"
"Beautiful!" she answered. "I wondered why I was seeing double. Tell us about it."
"They are two suns in one sphere, swinging on through space side by side. Two centuries of calculations have brought out the fact that it takes forty-four years for the light of Castor to reach us, and that a thousand years are consumed in one circuit of its orbit."
"I must admit," she said, looking up at him with a mysterious splendour in her eyes, in which there yet lurked a suspicion of humour, "that a thousand years gives me a shiver."
Up to this time the moral atmosphere of the room had by no means attained the level reached by Leigh and Emmet alone, not only because of the restless presence of Cobbens, which refused to harmonise with the idea of sublimity, but also because, in any such gathering, the tendency is downward toward the plane of the most frivolous and common-place person present. The jest about the class, intermittently revived, had reduced the stars to pretty baubles or, at most, to the fairy lamps of fanciful verse, in spite of figures of distance that grew more and more stupendous. But now a sudden hush fell upon them; it might have been a tardy appreciation, or the mere emotional reaction from little talk. For the moment Leigh forgot that they were not alone, and almost unconsciously he spoke the thought that had flashed from her eyes to his: "A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing that it is past as a watch in the night."
The situation had grown suddenly and unexpectedly dramatic. It was as if a troupe of revellers had torn aside a curtain in their mad rush, and had come face to face with the silence and blackness of an abyss. Miss Wycliffe rose from the chair as if starting back from such a vision, and though her tone, when she spoke, was light, it was apparently so by design.
"If you insist upon quoting from the Burial Service, Mr. Leigh, I shall take it as a hint to go home at once."