Jimmy stood for a moment in an embarrassed silence. It was the first time he had been alone with her, save the night he drove with her to Streatham, and he was a little at a loss for an opening.
He began conventionally enough speaking about the weather, and not to be outdone in commonplace, she ordered tea.
“And now, Miss Kent,” he said, “I have got to explain to you the solution of old Reale’s cryptogram.”
He took a sheet of paper from his pocket covered with hieroglyphics.
“Where old Reale got his idea of the cryptogram from was, of course, Egypt. He lived there long enough to be fairly well acquainted with the picture letters that abound in that country, and we were fools not to jump at the solution at first. I don’t mean you,” he added hastily. “I mean Angel and I and Connor, and all the people who were associated with him.”
The girl was looking at the sheet, and smiled quietly at the faux pas.
“How he came into touch with the ‘professor——’”
“What has happened to that poor old man?” she asked.
“Angel has got him into some kind of institute,” replied Jimmy. “He’s a fairly common type of cranky old gentleman. ‘A science potterer,’ Angel calls him, and that is about the description. He’s the sort of man that haunts the Admiralty with plans for unsinkable battleships, a ‘minus genius’—that’s Angel’s description too—who, with an academic knowledge and a good memory, produced a reasonably clever little book, that five hundred other schoolmasters might just as easily have written. How the professor came into Reale’s life we shall never know. Probably he came across the book and discovered the author, and trusting to his madness, made a confidant of him. Do you remember,” Jimmy went on, “that you said the figures reminded you of the Bible? Well, you are right. Almost every teacher’s Bible, I find, has a plate showing how the alphabet came into existence.”
He indicated with his finger as he spoke.