His eyes shone bright in the dim light and his face was somewhat thinner than Emmet had remembered it, but his manner was buoyant and alert. The visitor took a chair and glanced about him with interest, noting the changes that had been made since he last saw the place. He observed an improvised windbreak of canvas, and a charcoal brasier in the corner. "And how do you manage to work that sliding roof in snowy weather?" he asked. "A broom, a shovel, some salt to melt the ice, and a little oil for the wheels"-- "Well, I saw your telescope rising up above the towers about half-past four, and was so surprised to think that you were still taking observations that I came up to see how the place looked." "I 'm making observations for the parallax of Arcturus," Leigh explained. "The atmosphere is clearer in winter, you know." "How long might it take, now," Emmet asked jocosely, "to get at the facts?" "Who knows? Others have been working at the same problem for twelve years." Emmet emitted a low whistle. "What does it all amount to?" he demanded. "Suppose you do find the what's its name--parallax? It sounds like the name of some kind of weapon. Why don't you go in for some other line of business, before it's too late? There's the law, now--a short cut to politics. You could get somewhere in the world, if you did n't shut yourself up on this tower and spend your time in looking through that telescope." The reproach was in reality a compliment, and Emmet would have been disappointed had his suggestion been received with favour. "Since we 're comparing politics with astronomy," Leigh answered, "let me ask who was the governor of this State fifty years ago? Perhaps he spent a lifetime struggling for the place, and after his two years of office he was down and out for good, with the privilege of hanging his portrait among a hundred others on the walls of the State Library. But take any name connected with a scientific discovery, and it lasts as long as the world endures. Take even a lesser name--never mind your Galileos and Herschels. There's Asaph Hall, who discovered the moons of Mars, and already, before his death, he is enjoying his immortality." "But I thought you told me the instrument was no good," Emmet persisted. "Not as bad as that. It is n't what I should like, but a man must do something, even if it's only to keep in practice. It might stand him in stead some day in a larger place." Emmet was too much absorbed in himself to catch the hint of restlessness these words conveyed. Leigh's profession, like the ministry, made him, in the mayor's eyes, a being apart from the life with which he was familiar. It naturally did not occur to him that the astronomer had been driven back to his duty by the scourge of suffering, much less that his own wife had wielded the whip. He saw only an inexplicable devotion to an ideal pursuit. "Well," Leigh continued, with a sudden change of manner, "and how is the mayoralty getting on?"