Mr. Sylvester stood shocked and undecided. His fatherly heart urged him to search at once for the parent of this lame boy, and warn him of the possible results of entrusting his child to a woman with so little command over herself. But upon taking out his watch and finding it later by a good half-hour than he expected, he was so struck with the necessity of completing his errand, that he forgot everything else in his anxiety to confront Holt. Knocking at the first door he came to, he waited. A quick snarl and a surprised, “Come in!” announced that he had scared up some sort of a living being, but whether man or woman he found it impossible to tell, even after the door opened and the creature, whoever it was, rose upon him from a pile of rags scattered in one corner.
“I want Mr. Holt; can you tell me where to find him?”
“Upstairs,” was the only reply he received, as the creature settled down again upon its heap of tattered clothing.
Fain to be content with this, he went up another flight and opened another door. He was more successful this time; one glance of his eye assured him that the man he was in search of, sat before him. He had never seen Mr. Holt; but the regular if vitiated features of the person upon whom he now intruded, his lank but not ungraceful form, and free if not airy manners, were not so common among the denizens of this unwholesome quarter, that there could be any doubt as to his being the accomplished but degenerate individual whose once attractive air had stolen the heart of Colonel Japha’s daughter.
He was sitting in front of a small pine table, and when Mr. Sylvester’s eyes first fell upon him, was engaged in watching with a somewhat sinister smile, the final twirl of a solitary nickle which he had set spinning on the board before him. But at the sound of a step at the door, a lightning change passed over his countenance, and rising with a quick anticipatory “Ah!” he turned with hasty action to meet the intruder. A second exclamation and a still more hasty recoil were the result. This was not the face or the form of him whom he had expected.
“Mr. Holt, I believe?” inquired Mr. Sylvester, advancing with his most dignified mien.
The other bowed, but in a doubtful way that for a moment robbed him of his usual air of impudent self-assertion.
“Then I have business with you,” continued Mr. Sylvester, laying the man’s own card down on the table before him. “My name is Sylvester,” he proceeded, with a calmness that surprised himself; “and I am the uncle of the young man upon—whom you are at present presuming to levy blackmail.”
The assurance which for a moment had deserted the countenance of the other, returned with a flash. “His uncle!” reëchoed he, with a low anomalous bow; “then it is from you I may expect the not unreasonable sum which I demand as the price of my attentions to your nephew’s interest. Very good, I am not particular from what quarter it comes, so that it does come and that before the clock has struck the hour which I have set as the limit of my forbearance.”
“Which is seven o’clock, I believe?”