“Go and bring him here.”
After the porter had gone, M. Verduret drew from his pocket his diary, and compared a page of it with the notes which he had spread over the table.
“These notes were not sent by the thief,” he said, after an attentive examination of them.
“Do you think so, monsieur?”
“I am certain of it; that is, unless the thief is endowed with extraordinary penetration and forethought. One thing is certain: these ten thousand francs are not part of the three hundred and fifty thousand which were stolen from the safe.”
“Yet,” said Prosper, who could not account for this certainty on the part of his protector, “yet——”
“There is no doubt about it: I have the numbers of all the stolen notes.”
“What! When even I did not have them?”
“But the bank did, fortunately. When we undertake an affair we must anticipate everything, and forget nothing. It is a poor excuse for a man to say, ‘I did not think of it’ when he commits some oversight. I thought of the bank.”
If, in the beginning, Prosper had felt some repugnance about confiding in his father’s friend, the feeling had now disappeared.