To whom this may concern
“Nobody could be any more concerned than I am!” He glanced up at Nancy for approval. She nodded.
“Now turn over to the next page, and see what you make of that!”
Bobby stared long and hard.
“It’s in code!”
“You will find it difficult,” said Nancy. “The way I have it figured is this: Doctor Hudson purposed not to have the matters which he kept secret divulged during his lifetime. The fact that so many of these odd wards of his are bobbing up now, ready to tell their stories of his strange dealings with them, convinces me that they were all virtually sworn to secrecy while he lived. Now that he is gone, they tell. I think the mystery is all contained in this book. Whoever reads it, knows the real story. Perhaps the doctor was willing it should be known after he was done with it, but made it inaccessible to anyone who might chance upon it while he lived.”
“He’s made it inaccessible enough—I’ll say!” Bobby growled. “Did you ever see the like?”
“This first page,” explained Nancy, “is unquestionably a sort of preface. You notice that all the other pages are completely filled. This one has only ten lines. It must be a foreword; an explanation; dedication, perhaps … You take it along with you … Know any Greek?”
Bobby shook his head.
“Oh, I know the alphabet,” he qualified, smiling.
“That’s enough … What’s the last letter?”
“Omega,” recited Bobby glibly.
“And omega is a sort of stop-signal, isn’t it? A sign for the end of something?”
He nodded.
“How many letters are there in the Greek alphabet?”
Bobby closed his eyes and counted on his fingers.
“Twenty-four.”
“Omega being the twenty-fourth—and signifying the end!”
“Right!”
“Now, what is the twelfth letter?”
“Mu,” answered Bobby, after another calculation.
“Well, if omega means ‘finished,’ what do you suppose mu means?”
“ ‘Half finished’—I suppose.”
Bobby soberly returned to the preface of the little book and found, at almost regular intervals, the letters μ (mu) and ω (omega).
“Is that a clue?”
“I think so,” said Nancy, “but it did me no good. I just offer it to you for what it seems to be worth.”
Not at any given moment of his long drive home did Bobby Merrick realize exactly where he was, as he swiftly covered the familiar road to Windymere. At midnight, he put up his car; went to his room; sat down before his desk, with Doctor Hudson’s private journal, a pencil, and a thick pad of paper; and at dawn was still experimenting without a glimmer of encouragement.
Meggs, opening the door to call him to breakfast, found him sitting fully dressed, with his head on his arms, asleep, and tiptoed downstairs, his eyes shining.
A few minutes later he whispered to the cook, in a tone of victory, “You lost your bet!”
“Drunk again?”
“Quite!”
VI
The glowing ellipse cast by the heavily shaded lamp at the head of her bed shone upon the weapons with which young Mrs. Hudson had armed herself against drowsiness when, at midnight, she had retired with a novel, two magazines, and a leather writing case embarrassingly stuffed with unanswered letters, resolved to stay awake until Joyce returned.
Shortly before two, she had lost the battle and now slept with the light shining into her troubled face. Not that the trifling incident of dropping off could have worried her; but it was all of a piece with the general failure.
Had the late Doctor Hudson been subpoenaed to the witness-box on the day of his death to report on the success of the marriage he had contracted on behalf of his daughter, he, being unusually fastidious about truth-telling, might have found it an awkward question.
The three of them had stood up, that crisp January morning at St. Andrew’s, in the presence of Uncle Percival and Monty—and the Senator Byrnes, who had run over from Washington—not so much as a bride and groom, attended by a grown daughter, cordially consenting; rather as a pair of strikingly lovely young women, attended by an elderly, distinguished guardian, invoking Church and State to legalize and bless their comradeship and give them a deed to it.
That it was candidly a mariage de convenance (the French for it was more euphonious than the English equivalent) caused Doctor Hudson no serious misgivings. He nursed no illusions on that subject, aware that if all the world’s weddings were limited to romantic attachments in which no material advantages were at issue on either side, the human race would long since have been exterminated; and that if it were unethical for a young woman to marry with the knowledge that she could not immediately give herself with unqualified devotion to her husband, the Holy Virgin herself was at fault.
Immediately upon the consummation of his wedding, however, Doctor Hudson had found himself falling sincerely in love with his girl-bride, and the comradeship he had sought to insure between Helen and Joyce was put in jeopardy.
Joyce was a poor sailor, and the first three days were rough.
“No, darling; not a thing … Please run along. I’d much rather you did.”
So when, on Sunday noon, she had been persuaded to come down to the blanketed chair they had prepared for her on B-Deck, she realized that she was being solicitously attended, on either side, not by an indulgent father and a devoted college chum, but by a man and his wife—good friends of hers, unquestionably, but, well—there you were!
All three of them tried
