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with me?” I daresay I sounded angry, although my exasperation was all for myself.
    “Of course.”
    “Thank you.” Ungraciously I stormed out, muttering to myself as I strode towards the nearest cab-stand, “Blind. I have been blind. ”
    How could I have overlooked a device so simple and obvious?
    Humph. I had been dense. Obtuse. Stupid. But knowing what I did now, with my finger upon the right clue at last, I felt sure that I would soon learn the nature of Lady Cecily’s difficulty.

C HAPTER THE F IFTH
     
    M ISS M ESHLE RETURNED TO HER LODGING MUCH earlier than usual that day, attempting and failing to give a smiling greeting to the startled Mrs. Tupper and her equally startled girl-of-all-work.
    Blessedly, the deafness of the former and the humble status of the latter rendered any explanation unnecessary. I simply nodded, waved, and strode upstairs. The moment I had closed and locked the door of my room behind me, I pounced upon the peculiar pink fan Lady Cecily had slipped to me. Holding it up to the window, I studied once more the faint markings upon the pink paper.
    Markings I had taken for a sort of checkered decorative motif, a watermark.
    And I confess that I said something quite naughty, for I should have guessed the first moment I saw them.
    But vexation would get me nowhere. Mentally setting emotion aside, I struck a match, with which I lit a sconce of candles. Then, taking my pink mystery in hand once more, I opened it until it formed a nearly flat half-circle, and began gently to warm it at the flames, careful not to scorch the paper.
    Gingerly moving it about to heat all portions of it equally and slowly, I watched brown lines beginning to emerge from the background of pink.
    Yes.
    Invisible writing.
    I noted with approval that Lady Cecily, with the instinct of a true artist, must have used a tiny brush rather than a pen, to leave no impressions upon the paper itself after her “invisible ink”—most likely lemon juice—had dried.
    My heartbeat hastened, for the secret message written on the fan was almost ready to be read.
    Rather, deciphered.
    When I felt sure the fan’s pink paper had yielded all the brown lines that it was likely to show me, I hurried to sit down with my writing desk in my lap, snatched up some foolscap paper, and began to copy the missive in pencil in case the original might fade. Even now it was difficult to see clearly. With some guesswork I transcribed it thus:

     
    Several weeks earlier, during a period of inactivity and, I must confess, loneliness, I had obtained and read a publication upon the subject of secret writing and ciphers. Not something I would normally pick up, but this particular “trifling monograph” (his own words) had been authored by Sherlock Holmes, my brother; I had read and reread it just to “hear” his precise and coolly passionate voice.
    Thanks to Sherlock, then, I knew that what I saw before me was called the “Mason” cipher, having been invented by Freemasons in the past century—but I could easily have solved it even before having read my brother’s excellent text, for this “secret code” was no secret, being commonly used among schoolchildren everywhere. Indeed, it could be decoded so simply that I wondered why Lady Cecily had bothered to use a cipher at all.
    At the top of my paper I scrawled the key:

     
    To encipher from this, one drew the shape of each letter’s container, so to speak. Absurdly simple. Deciphering was just as easy. Referring back to the secret message, I quickly translated it, thus:
     
     
    HELCLOCKEDIA
    EBBMFGAEIED
    UNLES
     
     
    That was all.
    “Curses,” I grumbled, glaring at the less-than-satisfactory message before me. The only words that made any sense were clock and, at the end, unless , misspelled.
    “Unless”? Unless what? The word suggested altercation. Do such-and-so unless you want a thrashing, or won’t do such-and-so unless…
    Unless what? A sentence ought not to end with unless