"I suppose I'll be getting the bills in a few days," her father remarked teasingly.

"It wasn't just the shopping. Dad," Nancy returned gravely.

Nancy now plunged into the story of the Oriental shop and the dropped perfume bottle, of her encounter with the stranger on the train, and the strange fact of having seen him a short while ago in a foreign-make car.

"What do you make of it?" she questioned.

Mr. Drew shrugged. "What did he look like?"

"The man seemed very polite, but he had a cruel look in his eyes." Nancy gave a brief description of him.

"Hm," Mr. Drew mused, "I can't say I like the sound of this."

"I wouldn't wonder about it," said Nancy, "except that the girl in the shop seemed so reluctant to sell the perfume. Why do you suppose she cared whether someone bought it?"

"Maybe she was instructed to save it for special customers," Mr. Drew suggested.

"Dad, you may have something there!" Nancy exclaimed.

She told her father about Joanne Byrd and described the office which they had visited together. She ended by showing him the figures which she had copied.

"This was almost all of the message," she explained. "I didn't have time to copy the rest. Can you figure it out?"

Carson Drew studied the sheet of paper. "I'm not an expert on codes," he said finally, "but I suspect this might be one, since the man lied in saying these figures are market quotations."

"Can you decipher it?" Nancy asked eagerly.

"I wish I could, but it looks like a complicated one. It would probably take me days to figure out what these numbers stand for. Why don't you work on it yourself?"

"I don't know too much about codes," Nancy declared, "but perhaps I can learn!"

"I have a book you might use," her father offered. "It may not help much, since every code is different. Still, all codes have some features in common. For instance, in any language certain words are repeated more frequently than others. If you can figure out a frequency table, then look for certain numbers to appear more often than others, you may get somewhere."