“Yes sir.” The janitor’s face expressed a slight degree of wonder, but his voice was emphatic.
Mr. Sylvester’s eye travelled in the direction of the screen. “Very well,” said he; and paused to reflect.
In the interim the door opened for a second time. “A gentleman to see Mr. Stuyvesant,” said a voice.
With an air of relief the director hastily rose, and before Mr. Sylvester had realized his position, left the room and closed the door behind him. A knell seemed to ring its note in Mr. Sylvester’s breast. The janitor, released as he supposed from all constraint, stepped hastily forward.
“That box has been found unlocked,” he cried with a wave of his hand towards the table; “some one has been to the vaults, and I—Oh, sir,” he hurriedly exclaimed, disregarding in his agitation the stern and forbidding look which Mr. Sylvester in his secret despair had made haste to assume, “you did not want me to say anything about the time you came down so early in the morning, and I went out and left you alone in the bank, and you went to the vaults and opened Mr. Stuyvesant’s box by mistake, with a tooth-pick as you remember?”
The mirror that looked down upon that pair, showed one very white face at that moment, but the screen that had trembled a moment before, stood strangely still in the silence.
“No,” came at length from Mr. Sylvester, with a composure that astonished himself. “I was not questioning you about matters of a year agone. But you might have told that incident if you pleased; it was very easily explainable.”
“Yes sir, I know, and I beg pardon for alluding to it, but I was so taken aback, sir, by your questions; I wanted to tell the exact truth, and I did not want to say anything that would hurt you with Mr. Stuyvesant; that is if I could help it. I hope I did right, sir,” he blundered on, conscious he was uttering words he might better have kept to himself, but too embarrassed to know how to emerge from the difficulty into which his mingled zeal and anxiety had betrayed him. “I was never a good hand at answering questions, and if any thing really serious has happened, I shall wish you had taken me at my word and dismissed me immediately after that affair. Constantia Maria would have been a little worse off perhaps, but I should not be on hand to answer questions, and—”
“Hopgood!”
The man started, eyed Mr. Sylvester’s white but powerfully controlled countenance, seemed struck with something he saw there, and was silent.