If Captain Ducie had ever amused himself with trying to imagine the
nature of the secret which he had now succeeded in unravelling, the
reality must have been very different from his expectations. One
gigantic thought, whose coming made him breathless for a moment, took
possession of him, as a demon might have done, almost before he had
finished his task, dwarfing all other thoughts by its magnitude. It was
a thought that found relief in six words only:

"It must and shall be mine!"




CHAPTER XIII.

M. PLATZOFF'S SECRET--CAPTAIN DUCIE'S TRANSLATION OF M. PAUL PLATZOFF'S
MS.


"You will have gathered from the foregoing note, my dear Carlo, that I
have something of importance to relate to you; something that I am
desirous of keeping a secret from everyone but yourself. From the same
source you will have learned where to find the key by which alone the
lock of my secret can be opened.

"I was induced by two reasons to make use of _The Confessions of
Parthenio the Mystic_ as the basis of my cryptographic communication. In
the first place, each of us has in his possession a copy of the same
edition of that rare book, _viz._, the Amsterdam edition of 1698. In the
second place, there are not more than half-a-dozen copies of the same