Pugsley was a pug, was a pug-nose, was tip-tilted. Therefore Tip represented Pugsley.
Miss Christmas, of course, was Noel, was no-hell, which naturally was heaven, and Heaven was Miss Christmas.
Lord Skene was a skein, was woolly, was a sheep, was a baa. Therefore Baa stood for Lord Skene.
His lady, by the same reasoning, was an ewe, and you being not-I, was knotty, which the point at issue was. Therefore Point represented Lady Skene.
I myself was Gaskett, was (what I hadn’t known; but Johnny was a learned and travelled little person) a piece of canvas used in furling sails, was a fastening, was a Button—and there I stop. I hadn’t the faintest conception of the use to which he proposed converting all these symbols; but he was very convinced of their necessity, and so I let the question go by default, and accepted a key.
He left me during the afternoon, to return, provisionally, to his inn in Footover, and I regret to say that I was never relieved over anything so much as over his departure. It was agreed that, until further notice from me, we were to hold no communication with one another unless in the code, and on that understanding we shook hands affectionately at the gate, and parted, strangers, beyond it.
Dear fervent little man. I wish I could have repaid your devotion as it deserved.
CHAPTER XVI.
A STRANGE ENCOUNTER
As I turned to go in by the gate, a figure, coming hastily up the road from Market Grazing, made a gesture as if to detain me. I paused in surprise; and in another minute the woman, for a woman it was, had hurried to where I stood, and stopped. She was panting heavily, and she put a hand on her breast as if forcibly to control its spasms. She was very thin, and dowdy in appearance, and had on a thick grey veil, pulled down over her face. But, for all the close secrecy of that screen, I knew her at once. It was Mrs Dalston.
I suppose I ought to have felt some discomposure in her presence, seeing the nature of my thoughts about her husband. I was conscious of nothing, however, but an increased sense of the aversion with which she had at the first inspired me. There was something antipathetic to my nature in this barren reticence, in this material and intellectual threadbareness, one might call it, especially as contrasted with the showy qualities of her partner. I could not dissociate in the two the essential squalor, whether of soul or person, which goes with crime. It was part of the eternal tragedy of her colourlessness, it was a heart-rending consequence of her malleability, that she was thus moulded to repel where she most sought for sympathy. But how could I know that?