“He’s a visionary, a dreamer,” answered the other testily. “A splendid mind, the vigour of a young brain ... and to waste it on the stars, on distant worlds with which no telescope can ever bring him into any useful contact, from which no nights of study, were he to live as long as Methuselah, will ever enable him to gain one single grain heavy enough to weigh down that scale there, that scale which as you saw, will not even bear a breath unmoved! And all this world, child, all this world!” In his enthusiasm the old man had risen and now was pacing the room. “This teeming, inexhaustible world of ours, full of marvellous, most subtle secrets yet submissive to our investigation, from the mass that blocks out our horizon to the tiniest atom that, even beneath this glass,”—he was now by his work-table and his fingers caressed the microscope—“is scarce visible to the eye, all obedient to the same laws and amenable to our ken! With all these treasures at his hand, awaiting him, he throws away his life on the unattainable, on the stars, on moonshine!” The faded dressing-gown flapped about the speaker’s lean legs as he walked; his white hair swung lightly over his bent shoulders. Ellinor looked after him with eyes of amusement. “The short of it,” said she, “is that he prefers his telescope to your microscope.” “Fancy to fact, girl! Dreams to reality! Speculation to uses! Ah, what should we not have done, we two, had he been willing to work down here instead of up there!” With a growl Master Simon returned to his sweet-smelling furnace and began mechanically to feed the fires with charcoal. She heard him mutter, as if to himself: “Work with me? Why, I hardly ever even see him! David’s a ghost, rather than a man—a ghost that rises with the evening shades and disappears at dawn; that never speaks unless you charge him!” Ellinor remained silent a while, pondering. Presently she said, in the voice of one who sees in what to others seems incomprehensible a very simple proposition: “He lives, it would appear, uplifted in thoughts beyond the sordid things of earth. He knows no disillusion, for the unattainable star will never crumble to ashes in his hand. He will never see of what ugly clay the distant and glorious planet may, after all, be made! I say: happy David ... not to have married his first love.” “Tush! Don’t you believe that David ever thinks of love.” He made an impatient motion with the bellows and cast over his shoulder a look of severity, of surprise that a person who had shown herself capable of managing the rider on his scale should endeavour to engage him in the discussion of such trivialities in this appallingly short life. Their glances met. It was his own spirit that looked back to him, brightly defiant, out of eyes as brilliant and as searching as his own, and as blue.