Three weeks had passed and Madame Park still had not returned. Jisoo threw herself wholeheartedly into advancing Suyeon's training as quickly as possible in order to keep her mind off what might have happened to Madame Park. From time to time she would notice that Suyeon was flagging and she'd make certain to include time for rest and recovery. "Where do you think Madame Park is?" Suyeon asked one night as they were sitting in the drawing room after dinner. "I don't know," Jisoo said. "I have absolutely no information, which means she could be anywhere, which means I don't know what to do in order to be prepared in case she needs help." Suyeon pondered this for a moment. "That's why you've been pushing my training as hard as you have, isn't it?" she said. "You want me as trained as possible in case something comes up and we have to do something to help Madame Park." Jisoo took a sip of her tea and said "That's part of it, I suppose. I think another part of it is that I'm trying to distract myself so that I won't worry about her. I'm sorry if I've been working you too hard." "It's been hard, but also at the same time not hard," Suyeon said. "The mornings aren't too bad. It's less work than I was used to doing when I was in service. Plus it's made easier because I know I won't be doing that sort of activity in the afternoon or evening, while I was used to working twelve-hour days cooking and cleaning and so forth. It's actually been the afternoons and evenings that have been the hardest." "How so?" Jisoo asked. "I'm used to a lot of physical activity," Suyeon said, "but I'm not used to so much mental activity. People don't expect too much mental activity from a girl in service." She paused for a moment. "A lot of them don't want too much mental activity from a girl in service. I've had to pretend to be illiterate - or at least mostly illiterate - in order to keep jobs with clients who were afraid their servants would spy on them by reading their papers." Jisoo nodded. "Being able to convincingly act illiterate is a good skill to have," she said. "If a target thinks his servants are illiterate, he'll potentially be less careful about securing his papers. In fact-" Jisoo stopped taking because she heard footsteps. Turning to look at the doorway, she saw the night steward walking down the corridor toward them. "Apologies for interrupting, Miss Jisoo," he said with a bow as he entered the room, "but a messenger just arrived with this envelope for you." He held out a silver tray with the envelope sitting on it. She recognized Madame Park's handwriting at once. Once she had taken the envelope off the tray, he bowed again and said "I must return to my duties now, but the messenger is still here, in case you need a return message." "I'll be sure to ring for you if I need you," Jisoo said, smiling at the night steward, who then turned and left the room. "Well," Suyeon said, once she was sure the night steward was out of earshot, "it looks like you'll know Madame Park's whereabouts soon." "Possibly," Jisoo said, not looking up from intensely studying the envelope. "At the very least I'll know something, which is more than I know now." She got up walked over to the writing desk, where she pulled a magnifying glass from the drawer and examined the envelope in more minute detail. "Come sit and look over my shoulder," she said. "You'll need to learn to do this, and this is a perfect opportunity." Once Suyeon was seated next to Jisoo at the table, Jisoo restarted her examination of the envelope, this time narrating everything for Suyeon's benefit. They examined the writing, the edges of the envelope, the flap, and the seal in minute detail. "So you see," she said, "we can tell that Madame Park is most likely the person who addressed this envelope, that the writing has not been changed in any way, that the envelope does not bear any identifying watermarks or monogramming, and that neither the flap nor the seal has been tampered with." "And also that none of the edges have been slit," Suyeon added. "Yes," Jisoo agreed. "That is an exceedingly crude way of accessing the contents of an envelope, but it's generally the quickest, and with careful application of glue it's possible to close the edge in such a way that a casual observer won't notice it. Now that we've determined what we can about the envelope, what's our next step?" "Melt the seal off and open the envelope," Suyeon said confidently. "Melt the seal?" Jisoo asked, pretending to be surprised. "Why not just pull it off?" "Because there could be a small object secreted within the wax of the seal," Suyeon said, "and melting it will reveal the object." "Very good," Jisoo said. She heated the letter opener in the flame of a candle, then used the hot blade to slide the seal off the envelope and then melt it, holding the seal over a piece of scratch paper to catch the wax, which was then tossed in the fireplace once they were certain there had been nothing inside the seal. Jisoo then opened the envelope and pulled out the letter. She unfolded it and they began to read. It was, to all appearanceds, a perfectly ordinary letter, in which Madame Park tells of her trip to visit friends in Seoul, a new tea she's tried, the flowers in the gardens, and so forth, at the end of which she promise to be back in two weeks. "This is not, of course, the message," Jisoo said. "But the letter had to appear to be ordinary so as not to arouse suspicion if it was intercepted. So now we have to decipher it." "How do we know which cipher to use?" Suyeon asked. "Well," Jisoo said, examining the letter, "Madame Park has underlined the date at the top of the letter, so we should start with the date cipher. She showed Jisoo how to transform the numbers that made up the date into a pattern showing which words should be kept and which should be skipped. Once they had applied this pattern to the letter, a message was revea