"Why fatal, Professor?" he asked, for it was at the bade of his head to suggest to Sir George the advisability of despatching an expedition when the time was ripe.

"Fatal to the scheme as well as to the newspaper," was the elder man's response. "Even you modern journalists cannot make money by exploiting sacred relics of such importance."

"No, but we could investigate for the benefit of the Hebrew race. We sorely would not lose prestige by that?"

"Yes, you would. No Jew, or even Christian for that matter, would ever believe that a newspaper defrayed the cost of an expedition out of pure regard for the interests of the Hebrew faith." He laughed. "The public know too well that a `boom' means to a newspaper increased circulation, and, therefore, increased income. Before these days of the yellow journalism, the press was supposed to be above such ruses; but now the public receives the journalistic `boom' with its tongue in its cheek."

"You're quite right, Professor, quite right!" remarked Frank, for the first time realising that to "work" the treasure of Israel as a "boom"

for his group of newspapers and periodicals was impossible. "I've only regarded it from the business side, and not from the sentimental. I see now that any newspaper touching it would be treading dangerous ground, and might at once wound religious susceptibilities."

"I'm glad you've seen it in that light!" replied the old scholar, stroking his grey hair. "As far as I can discern, the best mode of procedure--providing of course, that we can discover the key number to the numerical cipher--is for me to write an article in the _Contemporary_ with a view to obtaining the financial a.s.sistance of the Jewish community. I know the Jew well enough to be confident, that all, from the Jew pedlar in the East End to the family of Rothschild itself, would unite in a.s.sisting to discover the sacred treasures of the Temple." And for half an hour or so they chatted, until Frank was able to slip away with Gwen into the drawing-room where, without a single word, he clasped her in his arms pa.s.sionately and kissed her upon the lips.

He held her closely pressed to his breast, as he stroked her soft hair tenderly, and looked into those wide-open, trustful eyes. Surely that frank expression of true and abiding love could not be feigned! There is, in a true woman's eyes, a love-look that cannot lie! He saw it, and was at once satisfied.

In a low voice he begged forgiveness for misjudging her, repeating his great and unbounded affection. She heard his quick strained voice, and listened to his heartfelt words, and then, unable to restrain her joy at his return, her head fell upon his shoulders, and she burst into tears.

She was his, she whispered, still his--and his alone.

And he held her sobbing in his strong arms, as his hand still stroked her hair and his lips again bent until they touched her fair white brow in fierce and pa.s.sionate caress.

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT.

DESCRIBES CERTAIN CURIOUS EVENTS.

Has it never struck you that this twentieth century of ours is the essential age of the very young girl?

Supreme to-day reigns the young woman between the age of--well say from sixteen to twenty--who dresses her hair with a parting and a pigtail, wears short skirts, displays a neat ankle, and persists in remaining in her teens. Grumpy old fossils tell us that this species is a product of an advanced state of civilisation which insists that everything must be new, from a dish of _peches a la Melba_ to the tint of that eternal h.o.a.rding in front of Buckingham Palace. One can only suppose that they are correct. Ours is a go-ahead age which scoffs at the horse, and pokes fun at the South-Eastern Railway, which forsakes Sat.u.r.day concerts for football, yet delights in talking-machines.

Is it any wonder therefore that the statuesque beauty and the skittish matron of a year ago no longer finds herself in demand for supper-parties, Sandown or Henley? No, she must nowadays stand aside, and watch the reign of her little sister who dashes off from the theatre to the Savoy in a motor-brougham still wearing her ribbon bow on her pigtail, much as she did in the schoolroom.

The young of certain species of wild fowl are termed "flappers," and some irreverent and irascible old gentleman has applied that term to the go-ahead young miss of to-day. Though most women over twenty-one may attempt to disguise the fact, it is plain that the young girl just escaped from the schoolroom now reigns supreme. Her dynasty is at its zenith. She is the ruling factor of London life. Peers of the realm, foreign potentates, hard-bitten soldiers from the East, magnates from Park Lane all hurry to her beck and call. The girl in the pigtail and short skirt rides over them all roughshod. And what is the result of all this adulation upon the dimple-faced little girl herself? In the majority of cases, I fear it results in making her a stuck-up, _blase_ and conceited little prig, for she nowadays takes upon herself a glory and exalted position to which she is entirely unsuited, but which she has been taught to consider hers by right.

Gwen Griffin was a perfect type of the very young girl, courted, petted and flattered by all the men of her acquaintance. Having no mother to forbid her, she was fond of going motor-rides and fond of flirtation, but through it all she had, fortunately, never developed any of those objectionable traits so common in girls of her age. She had managed to remain quite simple, sweet and unaffected through it all, and six months before, when she had found the man she could honestly love, she had cut her male friends and entered upon life with all seriousness.

A week had gone by, and Frank had called every evening. Once he had taken her to dine at the Carlton, and on to the theatre afterwards, for now they had, by tacit though unspoken consent, agreed that all bygones should be bygones.

Often he felt himself wondering what had been the real cause of her mysterious absence from home, yet when such suspicions arose within him, he quickly put them aside. How could he possibly doubt her love?

The Doctor was back again at Horsford, leading the same rural uneventful life as before, but daily studying everything that had any possible bearing upon the a.s.sertion of Professor Holmboe.

Frank came down to visit Lady Gavin one day, and as a matter of course was very soon seated with the ugly little man in his cottage home.

Diamond, over a cigar, was relating the result of his most recent studies, and lamenting that they were still as far from obtaining a knowledge of the actual cipher as ever.

"Yes," murmured the young man with a sigh, "I'm much afraid that old Haupt will get ahead of us--even if he has not already done so. How is it that you can't get your friend Mullet to a.s.sist us further?"

"He has left London, I believe. He disappeared quite suddenly from his rooms, and curiously enough, has sent me no word."

"You hinted once that he's a `crook.' If so, he may have fled on account of awkward police inquiries--eh?"

"Most likely. Yet it's strange that he hasn't sent me news of his whereabouts."

"Not at all, my dear Doctor," responded the other. "If a man is in hiding, it isn't likely that he's going to give away his place of concealment, is it?"

"But he trusts me--trusts me implicitly," declared Diamond.

"That may be so. But he doesn't trust other persons into whose hands his letter might possibly fall. The police have a nasty habit of watching the correspondence of the friend of the man wanted, you know."

"Perhaps you're right, Mr Farquhar," said the Doctor, with a heavy expression upon his broad brow. "The more I study the problem of the treasure of Israel, the more bewildered I become," he went on. "Now as regards the original of the Old Testament, it is not all written in Hebrew, I find. Certain parts are in Aramaic, often erroneously called Chaldee. [From Daniel, ii, 4, to vii, 28; Ezra iv, 8, to vi, 18; vii, 11 to 26; and Jeremiah x and xi.] Again, we have a difficulty to face which even Professor Griffin had never yet mentioned to me. It is this.

On the very lowest estimate, the Old Testament must represent a literary activity of fully a thousand years, and therefore it is but reasonable to suppose that the language of the earlier works would be considerably different from that of the later; while, on other grounds, the possible existence of local dialects might be expected to show itself in diversity of diction among the various books. But, curiously enough--though I am handicapped by not being acquainted with the Hebrew tongue--all the authorities I have consulted agree that neither of those surmises find much verification in our extant Hebrew text."

"I've always understood that," Frank remarked. "Yes. I've been reading deeply, Mr Farquhar. Curiously enough the most ancient doc.u.ments and the youngest are remarkably similar in the general cast of their language, and certainly show nothing corresponding in the difference between Homer and Plato, or Chaucer and Shakespeare. Though we know that the Ephraimites could not give the proper (Gileadite) sound of the letter _shin_ in _Shibboleth_, [Judges, xii 8] yet all attempts to distinguish dialects in our extant books have failed."

"I think," said Farquhar, "that such remarkable uniformity, while testifying to the comparative stability of the language, is in part to be explained by the hypothesis of a continuous process of revision and perhaps modernising of the doc.u.ments, which may have gone on until well into our era."

"Exactly," remarked the Doctor, "yet in spite of this levelling tendency there appear to remain certain diversities, particularly in the vocabulary, which have not been eliminated, and these serve to distinguish two great periods in the history of the language, sometimes called the gold and silver ages, respectively, roughly separated by the return from the exile. To the former belong, without doubt, the older strata in the Hexateuch, and the greater prophets; to the latter, almost as indubitably, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Ecclesiastes and Daniel, all of which use a considerable mixture of Aramaic of Persian words. Then, the great question for us is whether the ancient text of Ezekiel preserved in St Petersburg is an original, or a modernised version. If the latter, much of the cipher, perhaps all, must have been destroyed!"

"I quite follow your argument, my dear Diamond," Farquhar replied, "but has not Holmboe established to his own satisfaction that the cipher still exists in the ma.n.u.script in question? He has, therefore, proved it to be an exact copy of the original--if not the original itself."

"Experts all agree that it cannot be the original," declared the Doctor.

"It is quite true that Holmboe alleges that the cipher exists, and gives quotations from it. Yet now that I have been reading deeply I have become a trifle sceptical. I'm anxious for Griffin to discover the key number, and prove it for himself. Personally, I entertain some doubt about the present text of Ezekiel being the actual text of the prophet."

"That can only be proved by the test of the cipher," was Farquhar's reply. "If you accept any part of the dead man's declaration, you must surely accept the whole."

"I have all along accepted the whole--just as Griffin accepts it."

"Then why entertain any doubt in this direction? The Professor has never mentioned it, which shows us that there is no need why we should query it."

"Yes, but may not the fact of the text having been modernised be the reason of Griffin's non-success in discovering the key number?"

"Holmboe discovered it," remarked the other, "therefore, I see no reason why Griffin--with Holmboe's statement before him and in addition that sc.r.a.p of ma.n.u.script which evidently relates to the key--should not be equally successful."

"Ah!" sighed the ugly little man whose fidgety movements showed his increasing anxiety, "if we could but know what the old German was doing--or in what direction he is working."

"He's not back at his own home. I received a telegram from our Leipzig correspondent only yesterday. His whereabouts is just as mysterious as that of your friend Mullet. By the way--would he never tell you who were the princ.i.p.als in this opposition to us?"

"No, he has always steadily refused."

"Some shady characters, perhaps--men whom he is compelled to shield, eh?"

"I think so," answered the Doctor. "I wanted him to stand in with us, but he's a strange fellow, for though he promised to help me, he refused to partic.i.p.ate in any part of the profit."

"Has some compunction in betraying his friends, evidently," laughed Frank. "I'm very anxious to meet him. He promised to call on Griffin, but has never done so."

"He's been put on his guard, and cleared out, that's my candid opinion.

`Red Mullet' is a splendid fellow, but a very slippery customer, as the police know too well. He's probably half-way across the world by this time. He's a very rapid traveller. I've sometimes had letters from him from a dozen different cities in as many days."

"To move rapidly is always inc.u.mbent upon the adventurer, if he is to be successful in eluding awkward inquiry. He never writes to the child, I suppose?" Frank asked, as Aggie at that moment pa.s.sed the window.