with me when I fled from Boone, and
for the first few weeks after arriving at my uncle's house in Detroit.
Then, wishing to banish every reminder of days I was so anxious to
forget, I broke that chain, destroyed the locket and hid away from every
one's sight the now useless and despised cipher. Why I retained the
cipher I can not explain. Now, that cipher must prove my salvation. If I
could find it again I was sure that the shock of receiving from my hand
certain words written in the symbols he had himself taught me would call
from him an involuntary revelation. I should know what I had to fear.
But so many changes had taken place and so long a time elapsed since I
hid this slip of paper away that I was not even sure I still retained
it; but after spending a good share of the night in searching for it, I
finally came across it in one of my old trunks.

"The next morning I made my test. Perhaps, Henry, you remember my
handing Mr. Steele an empty envelope to mail which he returned with an
air of surprise so natural and seemingly unfeigned that he again forced
me to believe that he was the stranger he appeared. Though he must have
recognized at a glance--for he was an adept in this cipher once--the
seven simple symbols in which I had expressed the great cry of my soul
'Is it you?' he acted the innocent secretary so perfectly that all my
old hopes returned and I experienced one hour of perfect joy. Then came
another reaction. Letty brought in the baby with a paper pinned to her
coat. She declared to us that a woman had been the instrument of
this outrage, though the marks inside, suggesting the cipher but with
characteristic variations bespeaking malice, could only have been made
by one hand.

"How I managed to maintain sufficient hold upon my mind to drag the key
from my breast and by its means to pick out the meaning of the first
three words--words which once read suggested all the rest--I can not now
imagine. Death was in my heart and the misery of it all more than
human strength could bear; yet I compared paper with paper carefully,
intelligently, till these words from the prayer-book with all their
threatening meaning to me and mine started into life before me:
'Visiting the sins--' Henry, you know the words 'Visiting the sins of
the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.'
Upon the children! Henry, he meant Laura! our little Laura! I had
wakened vengeance in a fiend. The man who had calmly smi