the door and began
to descend the steps to the hall below. Her "grouch," he had called
it. Well, it had served its purpose! It was just as well that he should
think so! She followed to the door, and deliberately slammed it with a
bang. And from below, his laugh, more an amused chuckle, echoed back and
answered her.

And then, for a long time she stood there by the door, a little weak
with the revulsion of relief upon her, her hands pressed hard against
her temples, staring unseeingly about the garret. He was gone. He filled
her with terror. Every instinct she possessed, every fiber of her being
revolted against him. He was gone. Yes, he was gone--for the time being.
But--but what was the end of all this to be?

She shook her head after a moment, shook it helplessly and wearily, as,
finally, she walked over to the washstand, took the piece of paper from
the bodice of her dress, and spread it out under the candle light. A
glance showed her that it was in cipher. There was the stub of a pencil,
she remembered, in the washstand drawer, and, armed with this, and a
piece of wrapping paper that had once enveloped one of Gypsy Nan's gin
bottles, she took up the candle, crossed the garret, and sat down on the
edge of the cot, placing the candle on the chair in front of her.

If the last three days had been productive of nothing else, they had at
least furnished her with the opportunity of studying the notebook she
had found in the secret hiding place, and of making herself conversant
with the gang's cipher; and she now set to work upon it. It was a
numerical cipher. Each letter of the alphabet in regular rotation was
represented by its corresponding numeral; a zero was employed to set off
one letter from another, and the addition of the numerals between the
zeros indicated the number of the letter involved. Also, there being but
twenty-six letters in the alphabet, it was obvious that the addition of
three nines, which was twenty-seven, could not represent any letter,
and the combination of 999 was therefore used to precede any of the
arbitrary groups of numerals which were employed to express phrases and
sentences, such as the 739 that she had found scrawled on the piece of
paper around her key on the first night she had come here, and which,
had it been embodied in a message and not preceded by the 999, would
have meant simply the addition of seven, three and nine, that is,
nineteen--and therefore would indicate the nineteent