“Good Heavens!” he gasped, staring across the road, rigid. “Mullet was right! He was not mistaken after all! By Jove—then I know the truth! We are betrayed into the hands of our enemy!”
And as the Doctor stood there he was entirely unaware that he, in turn, was being watched from the opposite pavement—and by a woman!
Chapter Twenty Nine.
Which Solves a Problem.
That day had been an eventful one at Pembridge Gardens. Indeed, the event of the great scholar, Arminger Griffin’s life had occurred.
It happened in this way. The January morning had been so dark that he had been compelled to use the electric light upon his study table, and during the whole morning he had been engaged upon that same futile task—the problem of the cipher.
With the Hebrew text of Ezekiel open before him, and sheets of manuscript paper upon the blotting-pad, he had been absorbed for hours in his cabalistic calculations which, to the uninitiated, would convey nothing. They appeared to be elementary sums of addition and subtraction—sums consisting of ordinary numericals combined with letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
And curiously enough, in a back bedroom in the Waldorf Hotel, in Aldwych, the white-bearded old German, Erich Haupt, who only the previous night had returned from the Continent, sat making almost similar calculations. Before him also he had a copy of the Hebrew Bible, and was taking sentences haphazard from Ezekiel xix, the lamentation for the Princes of Israel under the parable of the lion’s whelps taken in a pit.