As decorations they meant nothing, indicated nothing, except that the intellect responsible for them must be a meagre one.
But as a cipher message these doubly bisected circles promised anything.
This is what Guild saw and what caused him to seat himself on the sofa beside the girl who still lay huddled over her pillows, her face hidden in her hands.
Seated, he drew out the portfolio containing his letters and a notebook. Then, slipping a lead-pencil from the leather socket and tearing out a sheet of paper, he started work--using the leather-backed book for a support--on a cipher which looked to be impossible. Yet, all ciphers are solved by the same method. And he knew it.
The first thing he did was to find his "numbers" in the mass of quartered circles. And, working steadily, swiftly, but intelligently, he had, in the course of an hour, discovered, separated and jotted down, nine of the quartered disks which he believed to represent numbers; and one extra disk which he supposed to be zero. And he numbered each symbol accordingly: merely eliminating all lines except those bisecting the smaller circles. This gave him in order
The next thing to do was to find what letters those numbers, or combinations of numbers, represented.
For a while he tried English, but arrived at no convincing result. So he tried German, first making a list of the letters which were likely to occur most frequently in the written language and then trying them with the symbols which occurred most frequently in the manuscript before him.
He found that the first symbol represented the figures 21.
The twenty-first letter of the alphabet is _u_. He wrote it.
for which he substituted the figures 14. The fourteenth letter of the alphabet is _n_. He had, so far, two letters, _u_ and _n_, to experiment with.
He had sat for several minutes gazing absently at these two letters when, like a shot, it struck him that the French word for the number, one, was spelled _un_. Could the key of the cipher be French? He separated and jotted down the next combination of disks
which gave him the numbers 19. The nineteenth letter of the alphabet is _s_. He wrote it.
or the figure 9. The ninth letter of the alphabet is _i_.
which, translated, gave him 24. The twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet is _x_.