Finis

Finis by Frank Lillie Pollock - Originally published in Argosy magazine in June 1906 A story of the last dawn that human eyes would ever see… "I'm getting tired," complained Davis, lounging in the window of the Physics Building, "and sleep?. It's after eleven o'clock. This makes the fourth night I've sat up to see your new. star, and it'll be the last. Why, the thing was billed to appear three weeks ago." "Are you tired, Miss Wardour?" asked Eastwood, and the girl glanced up with a quick flush and a negative murmur. Eastwood made the reflection anew that she certainly was painfully shy. She was almost as plain as she was shy, though her hair had an unusual beauty of its own, fine as silk and colored like palest Alame. Probably she had brains; Eastwood had seen her reading some extremely "deep" books, but she seemed to have no amusements, few interests. She worked daily at the Art Students' League, and boarded where he did, and he had thus come to ask her with the Davises to watch for the new star from the laboratory windows on the Heights. "Do you really think that it's worth while to wait any longer, professor?" inquired Mrs. Davis, concealing a yawn. Eastwood was somewhat annoyed by the continued failure of the star to show itself, and he hated to be called "professor," being only an assistant professor of physics. "I don't know," he answered somewhat curtly. "This is the twelfth night that I have waited. for it. Of course, it would have been a mathematical miracle if astronomers should have solved such a problem exactly, though they've been figuring on it for a quarter of a century."