At last: Do you know the story of Andromeda? he said.
--Perhaps I did once, but suppose I don't remember it.
He told her the story of the unfortunate maiden chained to a rock and
waiting for a sea-beast that was coming to devour her, and how Perseus
came and set her free, and won her love with her life. And then he began
something about a young man chained to his rock, which was a star-gazer's
tower, a prey by turns to ambition, and lonely self-contempt and
unwholesome scorn of the life he looked down upon after the serenity of
the firmament, and endless questionings that led him nowhere,--and now he
had only one more question to ask. He loved her. Would she break his
chain?--He held both his hands out towards her, the palms together, as if
they were fettered at the wrists. She took hold of them very gently;
parted them a little; then wider--wider--and found herself all at once
folded, unresisting, in her lover's arms.
So there was a new double-star in the living firmament. The
constellations seemed to kindle with new splendors as the student and the
story-teller walked homeward in their light; Alioth and Algol looked down
on them as on the first pair of lovers they shone over, and the autumn
air seemed full of harmonies as when the morning stars sang together.
XII
The old Master had asked us, the Young Astronomer and myself, into his
library, to hear him read some passages from his interleaved book.
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