“Even now I was in considerable difficulty, but a happy thought
put me in possession of several other letters. It occurred to me
that if these appeals came, as I expected, from someone who had
been intimate with the lady in her early life, a combination
which contained two E’s with three letters between might very
well stand for the name ‘ELSIE.’ On examination I found that such
a combination formed the termination of the message which was
three times repeated. It was certainly some appeal to ‘Elsie.’ In
this way I had got my L, S, and I. But what appeal could it be?
There were only four letters in the word which preceded ‘Elsie,’
and it ended in E. Surely the word must be ‘COME.’ I tried all
other four letters ending in E, but could find none to fit the
case. So now I was in possession of C, O, and M, and I was in a
position to attack the first message once more, dividing it into
words and putting dots for each symbol which was still unknown.
So treated, it worked out in this fashion:
.M .ERE ..E SL.NE.
“Now the first letter _can_ only be A, which is a most useful
discovery, since it occurs no fewer than three times in this
short sentence, and the H is also apparent in the second word.
Now it becomes: