ith earthquake shudders when she thought that what she had seen but a
few time-moments ago had really come to pass; and she longed for the
power to show all this to the men and women of her own passing day, and
bid them have done with the poor, shadowy images of themselves, which,
had they really been gods, would have made of human life something
better and happier and nobler than the ghastly tragedy which, as she had
seen with her own eyes, it had been. But she knew that such a power was
not hers. She, like her father, had, through the toil and strife and
stress of many lives of mingled good and evil, knowledge and ignorance,
won her way to the Perfect Knowledge; and so she knew that all these
poor kings and slaves, conquerors and conquered, torturers and tortured,
were all doing the same thing, were all groping their way through the
shadows and the night towards the dawn and the light, through the hell
of ignorance to the heaven of knowledge.

And now, too, since the Wisdom of the Ages was hers, she saw that over
all the vast, weltering swarm of struggling immortals, hung the
inevitable decree of silent, impersonal destiny. "As ye live, so shall
ye die; as ye end, so shall ye begin again--in knowledge or ignorance,
in good or evil, life after life, death after death, world without
end."

It was clear to her now why "some are born to honour and some to
dishonour": some to happiness and some to misery, each in his or her
degree; why the liver of a good life was happy, no matter what his place
in the earth-life might be: and why the evil liver, no matter how high
he might stand in his own or others' sight, carried the canker of past
misdeeds in his heart. Standing, as she now did, in the midway of the
present, looking with single gaze on past and future, she saw at once
the honest striver after good in his yesterday-life rise to his reward
in the life of to-day, and the dishonest rich and powerful sitting in
the high places of to-day cast down into the gutterways of to-morrow.
Life had ceased to be a riddle to her now.

What with their halts at Ostend, Cologne, and Hamburg, the
thirty-three-hour journey lengthened itself out very pleasantly into a
week; and so, when the famous city on the Sound was reached, they were
as fresh and unfatigued as they were on the morning that they left "The
Wilderness." Of course, they put up at the Hotel d'Angleterre, and here
they enjoyed themselves quietly for four days, for of all Eur