“I have looked into her eyes and seen no love in them,” replied Alan, flushing to his temples with shame and anger. “Her old love for me is dead, as it may well be. How could I expect her purity to mate with my”—
“Stop, Alan!” exclaimed his father before he had time to utter the shameful word that was on his lips. “Those are no words for you to speak or for me to hear, especially at such a time as this. If any stain ever rested upon you you have more than purged it already. The man who is found worthy the confidence of the rulers of Aeria is worthy the respect, if not the love, of any woman in the State. Whether Alma loves you still or not is a question for her own heart to answer, but you must not call yourself unworthy in my hearing.”
“Nor yet in mine,” said Alma’s father warmly. “If the shadow of death had not fallen across all our life-ways as it has done, there is no man who wears the Golden Wings that I would so willingly see Alma join hands with as yourself. If I, her father, hold you worthy to live with her, surely you cannot hold yourself unworthy to die with her.”
As he spoke he held out his hand to Alan, and he, unable to find words to answer him, grasped it in silence, broken only by a murmur of approval from the assembled members of the Council.
“Thank you, my friend, for saying that!” said the President to Tremayne. “Alan can ask no better assurance unless he has it from Alma’s own lips. But now I have something more to say, something that will give the true reason for my recall of all the Aerians who were beyond our borders. Let the words you are now going to hear be heard with all respect, for they are not mine but those of the Master himself.”
Amidst an expectant silence he now resumed his place at the head of the Council table, and bidding Alan and the Vice-President to be seated, took a long parchment envelope brown with age from the breast of his tunic and said—
“This contains the last words of him who prophesied the doom with which humanity now stands confronted, and who thus speaks to us from the past, and gives us good counsel and comfort in the hour of our perplexity and sorrow. It has been handed down with its seal unbroken from father to son for four generations, and now it has fallen to me to break the seal and read what no eyes but those of Natas and my own have ever seen. This is the endorsement upon the cover—
‘To the son or daughter of my line who shall be the head of the House of Arnold in the fifth generation from me:—When the world is threatened with the final ruin that I have foreshadowed, open this and read my words to all who are then dwelling in Aeria.
Natas.’”
The President paused, and everyone waited with most anxious expectation as he opened the envelope and took from it four square sheets of parchment. He unfolded them and went on—