lation was
slightly rambling, and a little incoherent?"

"I have hoped that it was," said Hilda, pathetically.

"You may be assured of it," said Obed. "Read it for yourself, and
think for a moment whether any human being would think of writing
such stuff as that." And he motioned contemptuously to the paper
where her interpretation was written out. "There's no meaning in it
except this, which I have now noticed for the first time--that the
miserable scoundrel who wrote this has done it so as to throw
suspicion upon the man whom he was bound to love with all his
contemptible heart, if he had one, which he hadn't. I see now. The
infernal sneak!"

And Obed, glaring at the paper, actually ground his teeth in rage. At
length he looked up, and calmly said:

"Madam, it happens that in this interpretation of yours you are
totally and utterly astray. In your deep love for your father"--and
here Hilda imagined a sneer--"you will be rejoiced to learn this.
This cipher is an old-acquaintance. I unraveled it all many years
ago--almost before you were born, certainly before you ever thought
of ciphers. I have all the papers by me. You couldn't have come to a
better person than me--in fact, I'm the only person, I suppose, that
you could come to. I will therefore explain the whole matter, so that
for the rest of your life your affectionate and guileless nature may
no longer be disturbed by those lamentable suspicions which you have
cultivated about the noblest gentleman and most stainless soldier
that ever breathed."

With these words he left the room, and shortly returned with some
papers. These he spread before Hilda. One was the cipher itself--a
fac-simile of her own. The next was a mass of letters, written out in
capitals on a square block. Every cipher was written out here in its
Roman equivalent.

As he spread this out Obed showed her the true character of it.

"You have mistaken it," he said. "In the cipher there is a double
alphabet. The upper half is written in the first, the lower half in
the second. The second alphabet has most of the letters of the first;
those of most frequent occurrence are changed, and instead of
astronomical signs, punctuation marks are used. You have succeeded, I
see, in finding the key to the upper part, but you do not seem to
have thought that the lower part required a separate examination. You
seem to suppose that all this mass of letters is unmeaning, and was
inserted by way of recreation