There, as the gracious Reader will also remember,
he had come a little too late to catch that sight of the Projectile
which Belfast had at first reported so confidently, but of which the
Professor by degrees had begun to entertain the most serious doubts.
In these doubts, however, Marston, strange to say, would not permit
himself for one moment to share. Belfast might shake his head as much as
he pleased; he, Marston, was no fickle reed to be shaken by every wind;
he firmly believed the Projectile to be there before him, actually in
sight, if he could only see it. All the long night of the 13th, and even
for several hours of the 14th, he never quitted the telescope for a
single instant. The midnight sky was in magnificent order; not a speck
dimmed its azure of an intensely dark tint. The stars blazed out like
fires; the Moon refused none of her secrets to the scientists who were
gazing at her so intently that night from the platform on the summit of
Long's Peak. But no black spot crawling over her resplendent surface
rewarded their eager gaze. Marston indeed would occasionally utter a
joyful cry announcing some discovery, but in a moment after he was
confessing with groans that it was all a false alarm.
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