“My good young friend,” exclaimed the aged student, “while you, through your astrolabes, watch the revolving, the fading and growing of systems which you can neither control nor make use of, I, through those second eyes and those regulated fires, not only learn for the great benefit of science at large, the workings of the atoms that absolutely rule, nay, compose all life here below, but I can direct and guide them in one direction, neutralise or stimulate them in another, make them in short bring good or evil to humanity. I delight my own brain, but I also benefit the vast, suffering body of my kind.” “The body, the body!” repeated the other, at once sweetly and contemptuously but still with the fire in his eye. On his side Master Simon chuckled and rubbed his hands over his irrefutable arguments. Then Sir David said again, almost as if he had not before proffered the request: “Come, cousin, I want you to look at my new star.” “Not I,” laughed Master Simon, tossing down the last drop of his second glass with the quaintest air of “abandonment,” wrapping his faded gown about him and folding himself in it as in a mantle of luxurious egotism. “Not I? Shall I spoil all these excellent impressions and bring my poor old bones back to a sense of age and infirmity by dragging them up your cold stairs to the top of your tower, there to stand in your draughty box and let all the winds of heaven find out my weak points—for the pleasure of gaping at a speck of light than which this lamp here is not less handsome, while immeasurably more useful? No, Sir David!” Ellinor laid her hand upon her cousin’s arm. “May I come?” She spoke upon the true feminine impulse which cannot bear to see the avoidable disappointment inflicted; a feeling which men, and wisely, cultivate not at all in their commerce with each other. David, again back in spirit with the heavens, turned upon her much the same look he had given her upon his first entrance. Then, as he stood a second, to all outward appearance impassive and detached, a curious feeling as of the realisation of some beautiful dream took possession of his senses. The fragrant breath of the distilled and sublimated herbs, “yielding up their little souls, good little souls!” in aromatic dissolution, filled his nostrils as with an extraordinary meaning. The sound of his kinswoman’s voice, the touch of her hand, the subtle, out-of-door freshness of her presence in this warm room—all these things struck chords that had long been silent in his being. And the glance of her eyes! It was as blue as his star! He took her fingers with a certain grace of gesture, born it might be of the forgotten minuets of his adolescent days, and prepared to lead her forth. But at the door he paused. “As your father says, it is cold upon my tower.”