correspondence inviolable.  I could not see why he considered this likely ever to be desirable, but I took the description of it which he gave me and promised that I would never let it leave my person.  I even allowed him to solder about my neck the chain which held the locket in which he had placed it.  Consequently I had it 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 smiled in my face as he handed me back that empty envelope inscribed with the wild appeal, ‘Is it you?’ was the man I had once driven to the verge of the grave and who had come back now to destroy us all.