She sighed, but uttered no reply. I noticed that as I spoke her countenance went a trifle paler, but she remained silent, as though she feared to speak lest she should inadvertently expose what she intended should remain a secret.
My chief thought at that moment, however, was the elucidation of the problem presented by those thirty-two well-thumbed cards. The secret of Burton Blair, the knowledge of which had brought him his millions, was hidden there, and as it had been bequeathed to me it was surely to my interest to exert every effort to gain exact knowledge of it. I recollected how very careful he had been over that little bag which now lay empty upon the table, and with what careless confidence he had shown it to me on that night when he was but a homeless wanderer tramping the muddy turnpike roads.
As he had held it in his hand, his eyes had brightened with keen anticipation. He would be a rich man some day, he had prophesied, and I, in my ignorance, had then believed him to be romancing. But when I looked around that room in which I now stood and saw that Murillo and that Tintoretto, each of them worth a small fortune in themselves, I was bound to confess that I had wrongly mistrusted him.
And the secret written upon that insignificant-looking little pack of cards was mine—if only I could decipher it!
Surely no situation could be more tantalising to a poor man like myself. The man whom I had been able to befriend had left me, in gracious recognition, the secret of the source of his enormous income, yet so well concealed was it that neither Mabel nor myself could decipher it.
“What shall you do?” she inquired presently, after poring over the cards in silence for quite ten minutes. “Is there no expert in London who might find out the key? Surely those people who do cryptograms and things could help us?”
“Certainly,” was my answer, “but in that case, if they were successful they would discover the secret for themselves.”
“Ah, I never thought of that!”
“Your father’s directions in his will as to secrecy are very explicit.”
“But possession of these cards without the key is surely not of much benefit,” she argued. “Could you not consult somebody, and ascertain by what means such records are deciphered?”