he was writing a
confession of his crimes, which he was going to send to his brother.
The miserable creature had scarcely any spirit or courage left, and
generally when I visited him he used to begin crying. I put up with
him as well as I could, though. One day when I was with him he handed
me a paper, with considerable fuss, and said I was not to open it
till after his death. Not long afterward he died. I opened the paper,
and found that it contained only this cipher, together with a solemn
request that it should be forwarded to his brother. I wrote to
Neville Pomeroy, telling him of his brother's death, and he at once
came out to New York. He had him decently buried, and I gave him the
papers. I had taken a copy myself, and had found a man who helped me
to decipher it. There was nothing in it. The poor fool had wanted to
make a confession some way, but was too mean to do it like a man, and
so he made up this stuff, which was of no use to any one, and could
only be deciphered by extraordinary skill. But the fellow is dead,
and now you know all the business."

Obed Chute ended, and bent down his head in thought. Hilda had
listened with the deepest attention, and at the conclusion of this
account she, too, fell into deep thought. There were many things in
it which impressed her, and some which startled her with a peculiar
shock.

But the one idea in her mind was different from anything in this
narrative, and had no connection with the mystery of the secret
cipher, which had baffled her so long. It was not for this, not in
search of this interpretation, that she had come. She had listened to
it rather wearily, as though all that Obed could tell was a matter of
indifference, whichever way it tended. To find that her
interpretation was false had excited no very deep emotion. Once the
search into this had been the chief purpose of her life; but all the
results that could be accomplished by that search had long since been
gained. The cipher writing was a dead thing, belonging to the dead
past. She had only used it as a plausible excuse to gain admittance
to the villa for a higher purpose.

The time had now come for the revelation of that purpose.

"Sir," said she, in a low voice, looking earnestly at Obed Chute, "I
feel very grateful to you for your great kindness in favoring me with
this explanation. It has been hard for me to have this interpretation
of mine in any way affect my father's memory. I never could bring
m