“Is Miss Gwen in?” he inquired.
“No, sir. She’s not yet returned.”
“When she comes, please say I wish to see her at once.”
“Very well, sir,” was the quiet response of the well-trained maid who, by the expression upon her master’s face, instantly recognised that something unusual had occurred.
She glanced at him with a quick interest, and then retired, closing the door softly after her.
The Professor, reseating himself at his table, pushed his scanty grey hair off his brow, and again readjusting his big round spectacles settled down to continue his intensely interesting work of discovery.
“Holmboe says that the cipher exists in nine chapters,” he remarked aloud to himself. “I wonder which of the forty-eight chapters he alludes to! Now let’s see,” he went on, slowly turning over the leaves of the Hebrew text, “the book of Ezekiel’s prophecy is divided into several parts. The first contains chapters i-xxiv, which are prophecies relating to Israel and Judah, in which he foretells and justifies the fall of Jerusalem. The second is chapters xxv-xxxii, containing denunciations of the neighbouring nations; the third is chapters xxxiii-xxxix, which gives predictions of the restitution and union of Judah and Israel, and the last, chapter xl-xlviii, visions of the ideal theocracy and its institutions. Now the question is in which of those parts is hidden the record?”
The few words of the cipher which he had been able to read were continued in chapter xxiv, beginning at verse 6; “Wherefore thus saith the Lord God; Woe to the bloody city, to the pot whose scum is therein, and whose scum not gone out of it! bring it out piece by piece; let no lot fall upon it. For her blood is in the midst of her; she set it upon the top of a rock; she poured it not upon the ground, to cover it with dust,” etc, down to the end of verse 27. If those twenty-two verses only contained eight words of the hidden record, then it was apparent that the Professor had a greater task before him than he imagined.
Gwen, in emerging from Whiteley’s into Westbourne Grove, had met a young naval officer she knew. He was home on leave, therefore she had strolled leisurely with him down Queen’s Road and along Bayswater Road, in preference to taking a cab. A couple of years before, when she was still a mere girl and he only an acting sub-lieutenant, they had been rather attached to each other. He was, of course, unaware of her engagement to Frank Farquhar, and she did not enlighten him, but allowed him to chatter to her as they walked westward. His people lived in Porchester Terrace, and he had lately been at sea for a year with the Mediterranean Fleet, he told her.
The yellow obscurity was now rapidly clearing as, at the corner of Pembridge Gardens, he raised his hat and with some reluctance left her.