seemed at once borne out by an analysis of the figures themselves.  Thus, taking the first set of figures in each group, I found that in no case did they run to a higher number than 500, which would seem to indicate that the basis-book was limited to that number of pages.  The second set of figures ran to no higher number than 60, which would seem to limit the lines on each page to that number.  The third set of figures in no case yielded a higher number than 12, which numerals, according to my theory, would indicate the maximum number of words in each line.  Thus you have at once (if such information is of any use to you) a sort of a key to the size of the required volume.

“I think I have now written enough, my dear Ducie, to afford you some idea of the method by means of which my conclusions have been arrived at.  If you wish for further details I will supply them—­but by word of mouth, an it be all the same to your honour; for this child detests letter-writing, and has taken a vow that if he reach the end of his present pen-and-ink venture in safety, he will never in time to come devote more than two pages of cream note to even the most exacting of friends:  the sequitur of which is, that if you want to know more than is here set down you must give the writer a call, when you shall be talked to to your heart’s content.

“Your exhausted friend,

“GEO. BEXELL.”

Captain Ducie had too great a respect for the knowledge of his friend Bexell in matters like the one under review to dream for one moment of testing the validity of any of his conclusions.  He accepted the whole of them as final.  Having got the conclusions themselves, he cared nothing as to the processes by which they had been deduced:  the details interested him not at all.  Consequently he kept out of the way of his friend, being in truth considerably disgusted to find that, so far as he was himself concerned, the affair had ended in a fiasco.  He could not look upon it in any other light.  It was utterly out of the range of probability that he should ever succeed in ascertaining on what particular book the cryptogram was based, and no other knowledge was now of the slightest avail.  He was half inclined to send back the MS. anonymously to Platzoff, as being of no further use to himself; but he was restrained by the thought that there was just a faint chance that the much-desired volume might turn up during his forthcoming visit to Bon Repos—­that even at the eleventh hour the key might be found.

He was terribly chagrined to think that the act of genteel petty larceny, by which he had lowered himself more in his own eyes than he would have cared to acknowledge, had been so absolutely barren of results.  That portion of his moral anatomy which he would have called his conscience pricked him shrewdly now and again, but such pricks had their origin in the fact of his knavery having been unsuccessful.  Had his wrong-doing won for him such a prize as he had fondly hoped to gain by its means, Conscience would have let her rusted spear hang unheeded on the wall, and beyond giving utterance now and then to a faint whisper in the dead of night, would have troubled him not at all.