The Inquisitor.
The police inquiries into the whereabouts of Gwen Griffin had been futile.
The Professor, beside himself with grief and apprehension, complained most bitterly that the authorities had not treated his daughter’s disappearance with sufficient seriousness. In all the interviews he had had, both at the local police-station and at New Scotland Yard, the officials had apparently taken the view that the girl had left home of her own account. He had been told on all hands that, in the end, her escapade would be found to be due to some unknown love-affair.
In frantic bewilderment he had telegraphed to Frank Farquhar at the Bristol at Copenhagen, but unfortunately he had not received the message because on arrival at the Danish capital he had found the Bristol full, and had gone on to the Angleterre. Hence he was still in ignorance of the disappearance of his well-beloved.
Those mystic figures which the Professor had found scrawled upon his blotting-pad—the same that were upon that discarded scrap of waste-paper—also puzzled him to the point of distraction. Could they have anything to do with the girl’s fate? By whose hand had they been traced?
As far as they could discover, no stranger had entered the study. Yet those figures—“255.19.7”—had been written boldly in blue upon the pad. Could Gwen have done it herself? Had she left him some cryptic message which he now failed to decipher? But if so, why did those same numbers appear upon the scrap of paper discarded by the unknown man who was endeavouring to learn his secret?
After three days, during which time he puzzled over the meaning of those figures, applying to them all sorts of ciphers, he took a taxi-cab to a friend of his named Stevens, who lived at Streatham and was a Professor of Hebrew at London University.
The pair sat together for some time, Griffin having apparently called to pay a formal visit to his less illustrious confrère, when suddenly producing the figures upon a piece of paper he sought Professor Stevens’ opinion as to their meaning.
The other stared at them through his spectacles, and after a long consideration inquired:
“Were they written by a Hebrew scholar?”