“One night I found you asleep in your chair,” she said, “and the horruck lay beside you. I saw it was robbing you of rest, and so I put it away.”
“The horruck!” I exclaimed. “What can it mean?”
“Your teacher put the coin in your pocket that day before Christmas, years ago. It is one of a number of silver pieces that were marked by an old and kindly man who lived in Hearts-dale years ago. They taught his religion, and he used to slip them into the pockets of needy people, who wondered where they came from. We used to call them the ghost riddles.”
That night I solved the riddle of the horruck by writing down the alphabet and discarding x and choosing letters to the right and left of m, the middle letter. So I got this message:
Love is the key of heaven.
I love you.
It made me know that Jo loved me, and I went to bed happier than I had ever been.
It was my last night in the Mill House for many a long year. The cry of the wind in the chimney and the sound of the falling water put a new prayer in my heart and a solemn sense of the dearness of my old home, not to be lost in care and toil, in pleasures and palaces.
Next day I returned the horruck to Jo, so as to let her know, plainly, that I loved her also.