“Sorry to seem mysterious, old chap,” he said.  “I’ve just a bit of a job to do.  It doesn’t amount to anything, but—­well, it’s the sort of affair we don’t talk about much.”

“Well, you’re welcome to all the amusement you’ll get out of it, a night like this.”

Furley laid down his pipe, ready-filled, and drank off his port.

“There isn’t much amusement left in the world, is there, just now?” he remarked gravely.

“Very little indeed.  It’s three years since I handled a shotgun before to-night.”

“You’ve really chucked the censoring?”

“Last week.  I’ve had a solid year at it.”

“Fed up?”

“Not exactly that.  My own work accumulated so.”

“Briefs coming along, eh?”

“I’m a sort of hack journalist as well, as you reminded me just now,” Julian explained a little evasively.

“I wonder you stuck at the censoring so long.  Isn’t it terribly tedious?”

“Sometimes.  Now and then we come across interesting things, though.  For instance, I discovered a most original cipher the other day.”

“Did it lead to anything?” Furley asked curiously.

“Not at present.  I discovered it, studying a telegram from Norway.  It was addressed to a perfectly respectable firm of English timber merchants who have an office in the city.  This was the original:  `Fir planks too narrow by half.’  Sounds harmless enough, doesn’t it?”

“Absolutely.  What’s the hidden meaning?”

“There I am still at a loss,” Julian confessed, “but treated with the cipher it comes out as `Thirty-eight steeple on barn.’”

Furley stared for a moment, then he lit his pipe.

“Well, of the two,” he declared, “I should prefer the first rendering for intelligibility.”

“So would most people,” Julian assented, smiling, “yet I am sure there is something in it—­some meaning, of course, that needs a context to grasp it.”

“Have you interviewed the firm of timber merchants?”

“Not personally.  That doesn’t come into my department.  The name of the man who manages the London office, though, is Fenn—­ Nicholas Fenn.”

Furley withdrew the pipe from his mouth.  His eyebrows had come together in a slight frown.

“Nicholas Fenn, the Labour M.P.?”

“That’s the fellow.  You know him, of course?”

“Yes, I know him,” Furley replied thoughtfully.  “He is secretary of the Timber Trades Union and got in for one of the divisions of Hull last year.”

“I understand that there is nothing whatever against him personally,” Julian continued, “although as a politician he is of course beneath contempt.  He started life as a village schoolmaster and has worked his way up most creditably.  He professed to understand the cable as it appeared in its original form.  All the same, it’s very odd that, treated by a cipher which I got on the track of a few days previously, this same message should work out as I told you.”