“I am getting to that, dad.” With a shadow of her former frown, Jane cut off her parent’s interruption. “My grandfather’s other particular haunt was Central Park. He knew it from Scholars Gate at Fifty-ninth and Fifth to Pioneers at the farther northwest corner. He played croquet with other ‘old boys’ on the knoll above the North Meadow, sailed miniature yachts for silver cups on Conservatory Lake and helped the predecessors of Shepherd Tom tend their flocks on The Green. He had an eccentric’s distrust of banks and deposit vaults and chose a spot in the park as the secret repository for the most valuable thing he had to leave behind him. The only key to the exact spot is a cryptogram which he worked out and by which he expected my father to locate his inheritance.” Pape filled the pause which, evidently, was for the weighing of further information. “So this cryptogram or map was in the stolen heirloom snuff-box the night that I—that we——” “Yes. My grandfather, on his death bed, tried to tell me where he had hidden it, but he waited a moment too long. For years father and I hunted in vain. Not until the other day—the day of the night on which you and I met, Peter Pape—did I come upon it quite by accident in the attic space of this house. It was in the old snuff-box. I took both to Aunt Helene’s that night, hoping to find time to study and decipher it. And I did read it through several times, memorizing a verse or two of it and some of the figures before the opera. I asked my aunt to put the box in her safe, not telling her its contents. The rest you know.” Although Pape felt the danger of his “little knowledge,” he drove no prod; simply waited for her to volunteer. “A number of people knew of our long search for grandfather’s covered map, among them an enemy through whom we have been deprived, but whose name we do not know. How he could have been informed just when I found or where I placed it, I cannot conceive. Possibly the safe has been under periodic search, although we never suspected. Possibly some one within the house is in the employ of this unknown enemy and saw me give it to my aunt for deposit or heard that I had turned over some valuable. I was unforgivably careless.” “An inside job?” Pape queried. “I thought so.” “But not through Jasper—I’d stake anything on that!” the girl exclaimed. “He was our own butler in better days and is loyal, I know. Since that disastrous night, I’ve been trying to work out the verses of the crypt from memory before its present possessor would get the key to a translation. ‘To whispers of poplars four’ was the second line of one of the verses. That is why——” The rising of Curtis Lauderdale interrupted her. He crossed, with a nervous clutch on this chair and that, to where Pape stood in the room’s center.