"Will you tell me?" I asked impatiently.
"Here goes then. You remember that I set down my theoretical key-sentence, thus:"
| W | O | N | F | O | R | T | O | O | F | O | R | A | T | E |
"The uncoding went along splendidly for eight places, thus:"
| W | O | N | F | O | R | T | O |
| T | H | A | N | E | C | O | U |
"The rest was gibberish. It follows then that the running off the track must have happened at the ninth substitution and nowhere else."
"Obviously."
"The very morning that your letter about the library window arrived—that is, on June the twenty-first—I was sitting at my desk; for the ten thousand time, more or less, I printed out those distracting capitals:"
| W | O | N | F | O | R | T | O | O | F | O | R | A | T | E |
"As I looked at the line of letters I suddenly discovered something entirely new: the five end ones formed the perfectly good English word, Orate.