Did the blind little Alice perhaps feel differently? Her sensitive fingers caressed the stubble of beard on George's blood-smeared face. "In the morning you'll tell me all about Lea?" she murmured. "I--I really loved her, George." "Yes--yes, of course I will," he agreed. He avoided his father's demand for the drugs. "In the morning, Dad," he said. "Don't worry--I'll be careful of them. You and Alice better get to bed now. For me, I want a bath and shave. And a lot of sleep. I'm about all in." He kissed his father affectionately. His caress as he embraced his blind little sister lingered for just a moment. "Good night, Alice dear." "Good night, George." There was no one to see young George Carter as, later that night, he furtively tiptoed downstairs. Quietly he left the house, went down to the little rock garden where the moonlight gleamed on the old sundial and its metal pointer. And he did not come back.... That was more than a year ago. They found his scrawled little note: "Don't worry over me--I'll return shortly." But so far, he has not. The sundial is in the Carter living room now; the room is closed off and never used. If you go to the small New England village, perhaps Professor Carter would let you see the sundial. A microscope has been erected over it. A light always shines on the old metal pointer. Professor Carter is somewhat a grouchy, dogmatic old fellow. You might not like him. But despite that, there is never a day passes that for hours he does not sit at the microscope, peering downward so futilely little of the way, straining his eyes, hoping and praying that his son will return. And often, too, the blind little Alice sits there, listening, waiting for the tiny voice which will tell her that her brother has emerged. She is sure he will come; it would not be like him to go and never return at all. She wishes, too, that he would bring Lea back with him.... If you should go to see the Carters, go at night. Gaze up at the immensity of the distant stars, the faintest nebulæ over the house. They are thousands, millions, trillions of light-years away--distances beyond conception of the human mind. Then go in and stand by the sundial in the Carters' little living room. You'll see, quite plainly, the tiny abrasion on the narrow top edge of the triangular sundial pointer. Lea's world, infinitely distant, beyond the reach of any microscope, is there--her world with its own remote heavens, and its own myriad tiny atoms--and each of them holding still other infinitudes of smallness. End of Project Gutenberg's The Girl from Infinite Smallness, by Ray Cummings