With these words he left the room, and shortly returned with some papers. These he spread before Hilda. One was the cipher itself--a fac-simile of her own. The next was a mass of letters, written out in capitals on a square block. Every cipher was written out here in its Roman equivalent.
As he spread this out Obed showed her the true character of it.
"You have mistaken it," he said. "In the cipher there is a double alphabet. The upper half is written in the first, the lower half in the second. The second alphabet has most of the letters of the first; those of most frequent occurrence are changed, and instead of astronomical signs, punctuation marks are used. You have succeeded, I see, in finding the key to the upper part, but you do not seem to have thought that the lower part required a separate examination. You seem to suppose that all this mass of letters is unmeaning, and was inserted by way of recreation to the mind that was wearied with writing the first, or perhaps to mislead. Now if you had read it all you would have seen the entire truth. The man that wrote this was a villain: he has written it so that the upper part throws suspicion upon his benefactor. Whether he did this by accident or on purpose the Lord only knows. But, to my personal knowledge, he was about the meanest, smallest, sneakin'est rascal that it was ever my luck to light on. And yet he knew what honor was, and duty, for he had associated all his life with the noblest gentleman that ever lived. But I will say no more about it. See! Here is the full translation of the whole thing."
And he laid down before Hilda another paper, which was written out in the usual manner.
"If you look at the first paper," said Obed, pointing to the one which gave the translation of each letter, above described, "you will see that the first part rends like your translation, while the lower part has no meaning. This arose from the peculiar nature of the man who wrote it. He couldn't do any thing straight. When he made a confession he wrote it in cipher. When he wrote in cipher he wrote it so as to puzzle and mislead any one who might try to find it out. He couldn't write even a cipher straight, but began in the middle and wound all his letters about it. Do you see that letter 'M' in the eleventh line, the twelfth one from the right side, with a cross by the side of it? That is the first letter. You must read from that, but toward the left, for seventeen letters, and then follow on the line immediately above it. The writing then runs on, and winds about this central line till this rectangular block of letters is formed. You supposed that it read on like ordinary writing. You see what you have found out is only those lines that happened to be the top ones, reading in the usual way from left to right. Now take this first paper. Begin at that cross, read from right to left for seventeen letters, and what do you find?"
[Illustration.]
Hilda did so, and slowly spelled out this:
"MY NAME IS NOT KRIEFF."
A shock of astonishment passed through her.