Prosper took a seat at the desk of an absent clerk. The others were burning to know the result of the investigation; their eyes shone with curiosity, but they dared not ask a question.
Unable to refrain himself any longer, little Cavaillon, Prosper’s defender, ventured to say:
“Well, who stole the money?”
Prosper shrugged his shoulders.
“Nobody knows,” he replied.
Was this conscious innocence or hardened recklessness? The clerks observed with bewildered surprise that Prosper had resumed his usual manner, that sort of icy haughtiness that kept people at a distance, and made him so unpopular in the bank.
Save the death-like pallor of his face, and the dark circles around his swollen eyes, he bore no traces of the pitiable agitation he had exhibited a short time before.
Never would a stranger entering the room have supposed that this young man idly lounging in a chair, and toying with a pencil, was resting under an accusation of robbery, and was about to be arrested.
He soon stopped playing with the pencil, and drew toward him a sheet of paper upon which he hastily wrote a few lines.
“Ah, ha!” thought Fanferlot the Squirrel, whose hearing and sight were wonderfully good in spite of his profound sleep, “eh! eh! he makes his little confidential communication on paper, I see; now we will discover something positive.”