"You must remember," said Miss Krieff, "that this interpretation of mine is only a partial one, and may be altogether wrong. Yet the revelations which it seemed to convey were so startling that they have produced a very deep impression on my mind. I hoped that you would have done something. If you had arrived at a solution similar to mine, even if it had been a partial one, I should have been satisfied that I had arrived at a part of the truth at least. As you have not done so, nothing remains but to show you what I have done."
Saying this, she opened the paper which she held and displayed it to Gualtier:
[Illustration.]
"In that writing," said she, "there are twenty lines. I have been able to do any thing with ten of them only, and that partially. The rest is beyond my conjecture."
The paper was written so as to show under each character the corresponding letter, or what Miss Krieff supposed to be the corresponding letter, to each sign.
"This," said Miss Krieff, "is about half of the signs. You see if my key is applied it makes intelligible English out of most of the signs in this first half. There seems to me to be a block of letters set into a mass of characters. Those triangular portions of signs at each end, and all the lower part, seem to me to be merely a mass of characters that mean nothing, but added to conceal and distract."
"It is possible," said Gualtier, carefully examining the paper.
"It must mean something," said Miss Krieff, "and it can mean nothing else than what I have written. That is what it was intended to express. Those letters could not have tumbled into that position by accident, so as to make up these words. See," she continued, "here are these sentences written out separately, and you can read them more conveniently."
She handed Gualtier a piece of paper, on which was the following: