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the remaining pages. In a few instants they underwent the same transformation. But they had a somewhat different appearance. The ordinary running hand was interrupted here and there by long passages in cipher, which evidently contained news of particular importance. The cipher was a protection if the police should conceive some special suspicion, and not satisfied with reading the letter should try chemicals to see if there were hidden contents.

The ciphering was only occasional at first, the groups of large closely-written figures rising over the even lines of the ordinary handwriting like groves and bushes upon a field of grass. But further on the clusters of ciphers became thicker, until at the middle of the third page the figures joined in a regular forest, as in tables of logarithms, without the slightest interruption ot punctuation.

“Look here, Andrey, what a treat for you!” said Lena, pointing to the masses of cipher. “I am sure George put in so much of this on purpose for you!”

“A friendly service, upon my word!” rejoined the young man.

He hated the work of deciphering, and was wont to say that it was for him a sort of corporal punishment.

“Do you know,” he went on, “we have at least six hours’ work over this stuff?”

“Not so much as that, you lazy fellow. The two of us will get through it much quicker than that.”

“But I am rather out of practice. You must write me out the key to refresh my memory.”

This she did at once, and, armed each with a sheet of paper, they set themselves patiently to the task. It was by no means an easy one. George used the double cipher of the League; the original figures in the letter had to be changed by means of a key into another set of figures, and these again by the aid of a second key were finally resolved into words. This afforded an endless variety of signs for each letter of the alphabet, and made the cipher absolutely proof against discovery, even by the ablest experts of the police. But if the writing was defective it sometimes remained a mystery even to those for whom it was intended.

George, as became a poet, was by no means a model of carefulness, and at times his friends were driven to the verge of despair. Some parts of his cipher obstinately refused to yield