considered or set forth¹ the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly

    builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through

    patient and frugal² centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of

    it; Ignorance, wanting its day’s dinner, lights a fire with the

    record, and gives a flavor to its one roast with the burned souls of

    many generations. Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and

    multiplying needs, transforms itself into skill and makes life various

    with a new six days’ work; comes Ignorance drunk on the seventh, with

    a firkin of oil and a match and an easy “Let there not be,” and the

    many-colored creation is shriveled up in blackness. Of a truth,

    Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined³ by scruple⁴, having a

    conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a

    blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to

    seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric⁵ of human good,

    and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon. And looking

    at life parcel-wise, in the growth of a single lot, who having a

    practiced vision may not see that ignorance of the true bond between

    events, and false conceit⁶ of means whereby sequences may be

    compelled—like that falsity of eyesight which overlooks the gradations of

    distance, seeing that which is afar off as if it were within a step or

    a grasp—precipitates the mistaken soul on destruction?

It was half-past ten in the morning when Gwendolen Harleth, after her gloomy journey from Leubronn, arrived at the station from which she must drive to Offendene. No carriage or friend was awaiting her, for in the telegram she had sent from Dover she had mentioned a later train, and in her

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