“Georgie, my hand is positively being dragged about,” she said excitedly. “If anything, I try to resist.”
“Mine too; so do I,” said Georgie. “It’s too wonderful. Do you suppose it’s Arabic still?”
The pencil gave a great dash, and stopped.
“It is Arabic,” said Daisy as she examined the message, “at least, there’s heaps of English too.”
“No!” said Georgie, putting on his spectacles in his excitement, and not caring whether Daisy knew he wore them or not. “I can see it looks like English, but what a difficult handwriting! Look, that’s ‘Abfou,’ isn’t it? And that is ‘Abfou’ again there.”
They bent their heads over the script.
“There’s an ‘L,’” cried Daisy, “and there it is again. And then there’s ‘L from L.’ And then there’s ‘Dead’ repeated twice. It can’t mean that Abfou is dead, because this is positive proof that he’s alive. And then I can see ‘Mouse’?”
“Where?” said Georgie eagerly. “And what would ‘dead mouse’ mean?”
“There!” said Daisy pointing. “No: it isn’t ‘dead mouse.’ It’s ‘dead’ and then a lot of Arabic, and then ‘mouse.’”
“I don’t believe it is ‘mouse,’” said Georgie, “though of course, you know Abfou’s handwriting much better than I do. It looks to me far more like ‘Museum.’”