"Have you the transcript with you?" she asked. "It will be interesting to look at, though we do not understand it."
Idris produced from his pocketbook a scrap of vellum inscribed with four lines of tiny runic letters.
"And these are runes?" said Beatrice, looking at them attentively. "They are very like the characters on the bugle that hangs within the porch of Ravenhall."
"Precisely," said Godfrey, "inasmuch as that is an old Norse drinking-horn. But we are interrupting Idris' story."
"The sight of this inscription naturally interested me," continued Idris, "and I resolved to make an attempt at its decipherment, in the hope that it might cast a ray of light upon the mystery of Duchesne's murder, for I have always held to the belief that he was assassinated for the sake of the altar-ring. With this view I procured the services of a professor eminent for his knowledge of Norse antiquities, and under his tuition I began the study of runology.
"I was soon able to read all the letters of the inscription, and to pronounce what I supposed were syllables and words: but syllables and words would not yield any sense. And here and there came a juxtaposition of consonants quite unpronounceable. To add to the difficulty there were no spaces to show where one word ended and another began. All the characters were equally close together and seemed to form one long word. I did my best to break the inscription up into its component parts, but failed. I could not distinguish one familiar term. Either the language was not old Norse, or the professor had taught me wrongly."
"Why did you not lay the inscription before the professor," asked Beatrice, "and get him to decipher it for you?"
"Because I did not wish any one to know the secret till I myself had first ascertained its value. In the belief that it might be written in some language other than old Norse I made incursions, not very deep, I fear, into Danish, Frisian, Icelandic, and other northern dialects, but failed to identify the inscription with any one of these tongues.