He sprang to his feet and began to pace the vault restlessly, for a feeling of faintness and sickness came over him; he also experienced a difficulty in breathing, as the air in the place began to be vitiated.
Suppose John Hubbard should not return in season to release him before suffocation overtook him, he thought, a nervous chill creeping over him; but he discarded it with a bitter smile.
He well knew that the man would not dare to let him die there—that he was planning for him a worse fate than death, out of a cruel spirit of revenge, because he had dared to love the girl whom he, for some strange reason, coveted. He believed that he meant to so crush and humiliate him that he would never want to seek Allison Brewster again, or meet the gaze of her pure, clear eyes.
“He shall not do it! by Heaven! he shall not succeed in his atrocious designs!” he cried out, in a sudden anguish, as those torturing thoughts flitted through his brain. “I am an honest man, and I swear I will yet prove it to the world, in spite of the worst that he can do.”
A little later he heard the outer door of the bank open and close again, then the sound of steps and voices drawing near him, until presently, the bolt which fastened the door of the vault was shot back, and the next moment John Hubbard, accompanied by a policeman, stood in his presence.
“Here, Mr. Officer, is your prisoner, and that,” pointing to the two boxes upon the floor, “is the booty with which he was about to make off when I caught him,” the man explained, as he shot a look of malignant triumph at his victim.
“Humph!” ejaculated the officer, as he darted a comprehensive glance around the place, and at the same time taking the measure of Gerald.
“It is very fortunate that I happen here just as I did,” Mr. Hubbard went on. “I seldom come to the bank on Sunday, but there were some papers here which I was obliged to have to-day, and thus I came upon him in the midst of his depredations.”
“H’m! you look rather young and green to be a bank-robber,” the policeman remarked, not unkindly, as he searched the pale, handsome face of his prisoner; “you don’t seem like the sort, either, that would be up to such business.”
“I am no bank-robber,” said Gerald, with quiet dignity, and meeting the man’s searching look unflinchingly, “I am here under orders.”