Page:Silver Shoal Light.djvu/296

 leaving for an instant a wispy, nebulous trail.

"A shooting star!" whispered Garth. "I wonder where it went."

"It is rather queer, isn't it," said Joan dreamily, "to think that some of them are so far away that their light doesn't reach us for hundreds—of thousands—of years."

"What do you mean?" Garth asked.

"Some of them may have stopped being stars. We're seeing them the way they looked ages ago, because the light of them has only just reached us. They may not be there at all."

Her hushed voice lent the subject an added awe in the midnight silence.

"What do you mean?" Garth repeated.

"We don't know anything about the way they really look now. Some of them are so far away that it takes all that time for their light to travel to the earth."

"I don't like it," Garth said, clasping her; "it sounds too queer. But I didn't know that light went so slowly as that. I thought it went flash, so fast you didn't know it."

"Well," Joan said, "if I remember rightly, it goes one hundred and ninety thousand miles a second."