Hitherto I had mainly admired Mrs. Packard’s person and the extreme charm of manner which never deserted her, no matter how she felt. Now I found myself compelled to admire the force and quality of her mind, her readiness to meet emergencies and the tact with which she had availed herself of the superstition latent in the Irish temperament. For I had no more faith in the explanation she had seen fit to give these ignorant girls than I had in the apparition itself. Emotion such as she had shown called for a more matter-of-fact basis than the one she had ascribed to it. No unreal and purely superstitious reason would account for the extreme joy and self-abandonment with which she had hailed the possibility of Mr. Steele’s death. The “no” she had given me when I asked if she considered this man her husband’s enemy had been a lying no. To her, for some cause as yet unexplained, the secretary was a dangerous ally to the man she loved; an ally so near and so dangerous that the mere rumor of his death was capable of lifting her from the depths of despondency into a state of abnormal exhilaration and hope. Now why? What reason had she for this belief, and how was it in my power to solve the mystery which I felt to be at the bottom of all the rest?
But one means suggested itself. I was now assured that Mrs. Packard would never take me into her actual confidence, any more than she had taken her husband. What I learned must be in spite of her precautions. The cipher of which I had several specimens might, if properly read, give me the clue I sought. I had a free hour before me. Why not employ it in an endeavor to pick out the meaning of those odd Hebraic characters? I had in a way received her sanction to do so — if I could; and if I should succeed, what shadows might it not clear from the path of the good man whose interests it was my chief duty to consult?
Ciphers have always possessed a fascination for me. This one, from the variety of its symbols, offered a study of unusual interest. Collecting the stray specimens which I had picked up, I sat down in my cozy little room and laid them all out before me, with the following result:
cipher
[transcriber's note: the symbols cannot be converted to ASCII so I have
shown them as follows:]

[] is a Square

[-] is sides and bottom of a square,

C is top, bottom and left side of a square,

L is left side and bottom of a square,,

V is two lines forming a V shape

. appearing before a symbol should be inside the symbol

) appearing before a symbol means the mirror image of that symbol

^ appearing before a symbol means the inverted symbol

? is a curve inside the symbol

all other preceding symbols are my best approximation for shapes shown
inside that symbol.

; is used to separate each symbol __________________________

1. []; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <;

2. []; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <; L; ).L; <; )7;.7;

3. []; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <; ).L;.C;[];.L; >;,C; [];.<; ^[-]; ^[-];.<;

4. []; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <; <; L; >; ^V; L; V; []; )L; ^V; [-]; []; V;
).C; ^[-]; >; )C; ),C; V; <; C; ^V; ^[-];.>; [-]; <;

5. *>; []; V; []; *V; []; ~7; )C;.>; ^[o]; )L; ^V; []; Lo; ^V; )C; )7*;
V; )C?; L; )L; 7;.>;.^[-]; )L; >; <;:[-], [-]; Lo;.<;?[-]; )7; [-]; )C;
[];.C; [-]; *7; L;.7; ^V; )o7; *>; C; ^V;.C;.<; [-]; []; 7;.C; )L;:7;
[-]; )*L; C; ^V;.L;.>; ^[%]; C; 7; *L; 7; ):L; )7; ^.V; []; [-];.L;[-]
No. 1: My copy of the characters, as I remember seeing them on the envelope which Mrs. Packard had offered to Mr. Steele and afterward thrown into the fire.
Nos. 2, 3 and 4: The discarded scraps I had taken from the waste-basket in her room.
No. 5: The lengthy communication in another hand, which Mrs. Packard had found pinned on the baby’s cloak, and at my intercession had handed over to me.
A goodly array, if the latter was a specimen of the same cipher as the first, a fact which its general appearance seemed to establish, notwithstanding the few added complexities observable in it, and one which a remembrance of her extreme agitation on opening it would have settled in my mind, even if these complexities had been greater and the differences even more pronounced than they were. Lines entirely unsuggestive of meaning to her might have aroused her wonder and possibly her anger, but not her fear; and the emotion which I chiefly observed in her at that moment had been fear.
So! out of these one hundred and fifty characters, many of them mere repetitions, it remained for me to discover a key whereby their meaning might be rendered intelligible.
To begin, then, what peculiarities were first observable in them?
Several.
First: The symbols followed one after the other without breaks, whether the communication was limited to one word or to many.
Second: Nos. 2, 3 and 4 started with the identical characters which made up No. 1.
Third: While certain lines in Nos. 2, 3 and 4 were heavier than others, no such distinction was observable in the characters forming No. 1.
Fourth: This distinction was even more marked in the longer specimen written by another hand, viz.: No. 5.
Fifth: This distinction, which we will call shading, occurred intermittently, sometimes in two consecutive characters, but never in three.
Sixth: This shading was to be seen now on one limb of the character it apparently emphasized and now on another.
Seventh: In the three specimens of the seven similar characters commencing Nos. 2, 3 and 4, the exact part shaded was not always the same as for instance, it was the left arm of the second character in No. 2 which showed the heavy line, while the shading was on the right-hand arm of the corresponding character in No. 3.
Eighth: These variations of emphasis in No. 4 coincided sometimes with those seen in No. 2 and again with those in No. 3.
Ninth: Each one of these specimens, saving the first, ended in a shaded character.
Tenth: While some of the characters were squares or parts of a square, others were in the shape of a Y turned now this way and now that.
Eleventh: These characters were varied by the introduction of dots, and, in some cases, by the insertion of minute sketches of animals, birds, arrows, signs of the zodiac, etc., with here and there one of a humorous, possibly sarcastic, nature.
Twelfth: Dots and dots only were to be found in the specimen emanating from Mrs. Packard’s hand; birds, arrows, skipping boys and hanging men, etc., being confined to No. 5, the product of another brain and hand, at present unknown.
Now what conclusions could I draw from these? I shall give them to you as they came to me that night. Others with wits superior to my own may draw additional and more suggestive ones:
First: Division into words was not considered necessary or was made in some other way than by breaks.
Second: The fact of the shading being omitted from No. 1 meant nothing — that specimen being my own memory of lines, the shading or non-shading of which would hardly have attracted my attention.
Third: The similarity observable in the seven opening characters of the first four specimens being taken as a proof of their standing for the same word or phrase, it was safe to consider this word or phrase as a complete one to which she had tried to fit others, and always to her dissatisfaction, till she had finally rejected all but the simple one with which she had started.
Fourth: No. 1, short as it was, was, therefore, a communication in itself.
Fifth: The shading of a character was in some way essential to its proper understanding, but not the exact place where that shading fell.
Sixth: The dots were necessarily modifications, but not their shape or nature.
Seventh: This shading might indicate the end of a word.
Eighth: If so, the shading of two contiguous characters would show the first one to be a word of one letter. There are but two words in the English language of one letter — a and i — and in the specimens before me but one character, that of [], which shows shading, next to another shaded character.
Ninth: [] was therefore a or i
A decided start.
All this, of course, was simply preliminary.
The real task still lay before me. It was to solve the meaning o............