“Not five minutes. Make no noise; but enjoy yourself as well as you can.”
The man now left Gray to his meditations after carefully locking him in the room, and these meditations were very far from an agreeable or pleasant charae.
Gray’s first idea was that he would hide the money he had about him with the exception of the amount he had averred to, namely, two hundred pound, but then it naturally occurred to him how extremely improbable it was that he should ever have an opportunity of repossessing himself of it.
“Still,” he answered, with his usual selfish cunning; “still there may be a remote, although a very remote chance; and, at all events, if I never see it again myself, I may prevent these men from having it.”
Deep groans then burst from him, and he smote his breast as the thought came across him that all the gold he had wrung from the guilty fear of Learmont, and hoarded so carefully; might now be about to pass from him in a mass never again to bless his sight.
“They will rob me—they will rob me,” he thought, and compared with that, it appeared to him preferable to know that it was hidden from them and undisposed of, although inaccessible to himself.
How and where to conceal it then became the object, and he felt about in the dark to discover some loose board, or other means, of placing his ill-gotten money out of sight—where, for all he knew, it might remain until the coins of which it was composed, became blackened into curiosities.
Such, however, was not to be the fate of Learmont’s gold, for while Gray was still feeling about in the attic for a place of security in which to deposit it, the door was suddenly opened, and his former companion appeared, along with a shorter man, in whose countenance, nature or education had taken especial pains to stamp villain!
“Here you are,” said the man who had guided Gray across the roofs. “This is the gentleman, Bill. He was in an awkward fix, but now we mean to do the thing handsomely by him, eh, Bill, don’t we?”
“I should think so,” replied Bill. “Your servant, sir.”