"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