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And voice after voice repeated, "It is nearer," and the
clicking telegraph took that up, and it trembled along telephone
wires, and in a thousand cities grimy compositors fingered the
type. "It is nearer." Men writing in offices, struck with a
strange realisation, flung down their pens, men talking in a
thousand places suddenly came upon a grotesque possibility in
those words, "It is nearer." It hurried along wakening streets, it
was shouted down the frost-stilled ways of quiet villages; men who
had read these things from the throbbing tape stood in yellow-lit
doorways shouting the news to the passersby. "It is nearer."
Pretty women, flushed and glittering, heard the news told jestingly
between the dances, and feigned an intelligent interest they did
not feel. "Nearer! Indeed. How curious! How very, very clever
people must be to find out things like that!"
Lonely tramps faring through the wintry night murmured those
words to comfort themselves--looking skyward. "It has need to be
nearer, for the night's as cold as charity. Don't seem much warmth
from it if it is nearer, all the same."
"
What is a new star to me?" cried the weeping woman kneeling
beside her dead.
The schoolboy, rising early for his examination work, puzzled
it out for himself--with the great white star shining broad and
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