‘You are as unjust now as you have been generous hitherto,’ said St. Cleeve, with tears in his eyes at the gentle banter of the lady, which he, poor innocent, read as her real opinions. Seizing her hand he continued, in tones between reproach and anger, ‘I swear to you that I have but two devotions, two thoughts, two hopes, and two blessings in this world, and that one of them is yourself!’
‘And the other?’
‘The pursuit of astronomy.’
‘And astronomy stands first.’
‘I have never ordinated two such dissimilar ideas. And why should you deplore your altered circumstances, my dear lady? Your widowhood, if I may take the liberty to speak on such a subject, is, though I suppose a sadness, not perhaps an unmixed evil. For though your pecuniary troubles have been discovered to the world and yourself by it, your happiness in marriage was, as you have confided to me, not great; and you are now left free as a bird to follow your own hobbies.’
‘I wonder you recognize that.’
‘But perhaps,’ he added, with a sigh of regret, ‘you will again fall a prey to some man, some uninteresting country squire or other, and be lost to the scientific world after all.’
‘If I fall a prey to any man, it will not be to a country squire. But don’t go on with this, for heaven’s sake! You may think what you like in silence.’
‘We are forgetting the comet,’ said St. Cleeve. He turned, and set the instrument in order for observation, and wheeled round the dome.
While she was looking at the nucleus of the fiery plume, that now filled so large a space of the sky as completely to dominate it, Swithin dropped his gaze upon the field, and beheld in the dying light a number of labourers crossing directly towards the column.