He turned back to the brown desk and opened it without further delay.  His hand was firm now, and he took out the paper parcel that lay inside without a tremor.  It was heavy.  A moment later there lay on the table before him a couple of weather-worn plaques of grey stone—­they looked like stone, although they felt like metal—­on which he saw markings of a curious character that might have been the mere tracings of natural forces through the ages, or, equally well, the half-obliterated hieroglyphics cut upon their surface in past centuries by the more or less untutored hand of a common scribe.

He lifted each stone in turn and examined it carefully.  It seemed to him that a faint glow of heat passed from the substance into his skin, and he put them down again suddenly, as with a gesture of uneasiness.

“A very clever, or a very imaginative man,” he said to himself, “who could squeeze the secrets of life and death from such broken lines as those!”

Then he turned to a yellow envelope lying beside them in the desk, with the single word on the outside in the writing of the professor—­the word Translation.

“Now,” he thought, taking it up with a sudden violence to conceal his nervousness, “now for the great solution.  Now to learn the meaning of the worlds, and why mankind was made, and why discipline is worth while, and sacrifice and pain the true law of advancement.”

There was the shadow of a sneer in his voice, and yet something in him shivered at the same time.  He held the envelope as though weighing it in his hand, his mind pondering many things.  Then curiosity won the day, and he suddenly tore it open with the gesture of an actor who tears open a letter on the stage, knowing there is no real writing inside at all.

A page of finely written script in the late scientist’s handwriting lay before him.  He read it through from beginning to end, missing no word, uttering each syllable distinctly under his breath as he read.

The pallor of his face grew ghastly as he neared the end.  He began to shake all over as with ague.  His breath came heavily in gasps.  He still gripped the sheet of paper, however, and deliberately, as by an intense effort of will, read it through a second time from beginning to end.  And this time, as the last syllable dropped from his lips, the whole face of the man flamed with a sudden and terrible anger.  His skin became deep, deep red, and he clenched his teeth.  With all the strength of his vigorous soul he was struggling to keep control of himself.

For perhaps five minutes he stood there beside the table without stirring a muscle.  He might have been carved out of stone.  His eyes were shut, and only the heaving of the chest betrayed the fact that he was a living being.  Then, with a strange quietness, he lit a match and applied it to the sheet of paper he held in his hand.  The ashes fell slowly about him, piece by piece, and he blew them from the window-sill into the air, his eyes following them as they floated away on the summer wind that breathed so warmly over the world.