A feeling of trouble to come seized him.  He was perfectly sure he had tied up the letter with the parcel, and here was the parcel without the letter, and no one had opened the safe except himself.

“Never mind about the letter, grandfather,” said Iris; “we shall find that afterward.”

“Well, then, let us open the parcel.”

It was a packet about the size of a crown-octavo volume, in brown paper, carefully fastened up with gum, and on the face of it was a white label inscribed:  “For Iris, to be opened on her twenty-first birthday.”  Everybody in turn took it, weighed it, so to speak, looked at it curiously, and read the legend.  Then they returned it to Mr. Emblem, who laid it before him and produced a penknife.  With this, as carefully and solemnly as if he were offering up a sacrifice or performing a religious function, he cut the parcel straight through.

“After eighteen years,” he said; “after eighteen years.  The ink will be faded and the papers yellow.  But we shall see the certificates of the marriage and of your baptism, Iris; there will also be letters to different people, and a true account of the rupture with his father, and the cause, of which his letter spoke.  And of course we shall find out what was his real name and what is the kind of inheritance which has been waiting for you so long, my dear.  Now then.”

The covering incase of the packet was a kind of stiff cardboard or millboard, within brown paper.  Mr. Emblem laid it open.  It was full of folded papers.  He took up the first and opened it.  The paper was blank.  The next, it was blank; the third, it was blank; the fourth, and fifth, and sixth, and so on throughout.  The case, which had been waiting so long, waiting for eighteen years, to be opened on Iris’s twenty-first birthday, was full of blank papers.  They were all half sheets of note-paper.

Mr. Emblem looked surprised at the first two or three papers; then he turned pale; then he rushed at the rest.  When he had opened all, he stared about him with bewilderment.

“Where is the letter?” he asked again.  Then he began with trembling hands to tear out the contents of the safe and spread them upon the table.  The letter was nowhere.

“I am certain,” he said, for the tenth time, “I am quite certain that I tied up the letter with red tape, outside the packet.  And no one has been at the safe except me.”

“Tell us,” said Arnold, “the contents of the letter as well as you remember them.  Your son-in-law was known to you under the name of Aglen, which was not his real name.  Did he tell you his real name?”

“No.”

“What did he tell you?  Do you remember the letter?”

“I remember every word of the letter.”

“If you dictate it, I will write it down.  That may be a help.”

Mr. Emblem began quickly, and as if he was afraid of forgetting: 

“’When you read these lines, I shall be in the Silent Land, whither Alice, my wife, has gone before me.’”