He was a good fellow himself, and he had a wife who was all that was beautiful and charming, but who had once risked her reputation in an act which did call for public arraignment.
Unfortunately, there was a man who knew of this act and he published it right and left and--" "Olympia!" Mayor Packard was on his feet, pointing in sudden fury and suspicion at the table where the matches lay about in odd and, as I now saw, seemingly set figures.

"You are doing something besides playing with those matches.

I know Mr.Steele's famous cipher; he showed it to me a week ago; and so, evidently, do you, in spite of the fact that you have had barely fifty words with him since he came to the house.

Let me read--ah!--give over that piece of paper you have there, Steele, if you would not have me think you as great a dastard as we know that Brainard to be!" And while his wife drooped before his eyes and a cynical smile crept about the secretary's fine mouth, he caught up the sheet on which Steele had been playing tit-tat-to with the child, and glanced from the table to it and back again to the table on which the matches lay in the following device, the paper-weight answering for the dot: 7; L;.)7; [-]; ^V.

"M," suddenly left the mayor's writhing lips; then slowly, letter by letter, "E-R-C-Y.