The girl's gaze was directed at a certain spot which she knew well.
"Oh, I can even see--into some of the offices on the eighteenth floor!" cried she. "There, look?" And she pointed. "That one near the front! I--I used to know--"
She broke short off. In her trembling hands the telescope sank. Stern saw that she was very pale.
"Take me down!" she whispered. "I can't stand it any longer--I can't, possibly! The sight of that wrecked office! Let's go down where I can't see that!"
Gently, as though she had been a frightened child, Stern led her round the platform to the doorway, then down the crumbling stairs and so to the wreckage and dust-strewn confusion of what had been his office.
And there, his hand upon her shoulder, he bade her still be of good courage.
"Listen now, Beatrice," said he. "Let's try to reason this thing out together, let's try to solve this problem like two intelligent human beings.
"Just what's happened, we don't know; we can't know yet a while, till I investigate. We don't even know what year this is.
"Don't know whether anybody else is still alive, anywhere in the world. But we can find out--after we've made provision for the immediate present and formed some rational plan of life.
"If all the rest are gone, swept away, wiped out clean like figures on a slate, then why we should have happened to survive whatever it was that struck the earth, is still a riddle far beyond our comprehension."
He raised her face to his, noble despite all its grotesque disfigurements; he looked into her eyes as though to read the very soul of her, to judge whether she could share this fight, could brave this coming struggle.
"All these things may yet be answered. Once I get the proper data for this series of phenomena, I can find the solution, never fear!
"Some vast world-duty may be ours, far greater, infinitely more vital than anything that either of us has ever dreamed. It's not our place, now, to mourn or fear! Rather it is to read this mystery, to meet it and to conquer!"
Through her tears the girl smiled up at him, trustingly, confidingly. And in the last declining rays of the sun that glinted through the window-pane, her eyes were very beautiful.