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 some of her agony, for her father's guilt, was gone.

"What does it all mean?" she questioned me, able for a moment to forget her personal place in it. "What does it all mean?"

I played with a lock of her hair and looked into her wide grey eyes and I touched the smoothness of her cheek.

"It may mean that at last," I said, "at last the day has come for the destruction which men have looked for and feared since someone first struck a spark from flint or rubbed together two dry sticks to start a fire. You find the day described, my dear," I said, "in the legends of every people, in one form or another. It goes far, far back before the beginning of history when the Gods, but not man, had fire.

"The Gods, you know, argued whether to give it to man; and most of them were against it. But one God, with an overtrust in man, gave it away; or in some stories, man stole it; and so started the creation of instruments which man had not the moral equipment to rightly control and which therefore destroy him.