"Dear me," I soliloquize, while the contents of those bureau drawers are tossed here and there in the fever of my search. "How everything here reminds me of the past! She has even preserved the menu card of that memorable dinner at Torloni's; and here—here is a lock of brown hair tied with a pink ribbon! I really believe it must be mine!"
"My deah boy," howls Vandeleur, shaking me by the arm vigorously, "will you cut short your soliloquy? Is this a time for poetry, when we might get ten years if we were found burglarizing this house?"
I pay no attention.
"And here is the steel buckle from her shoe that fell off the night we danced together at the French ball. Poor dear Bella! that was not the only dance we led where folly played the fiddle!"—with a thrill of reminiscence.
"If you don't find those letters in just two minutes," interrupts the dreadful Vandeleur, "I shall post for home."
"In one second, my boy—one second."
Now I examine the bureau carefully for a concealed drawer. I seem to have ransacked every corner of that precious article in vain. Visions of Bella's vengeance flash before my eyes. I can see the demoniac smile on her face as she gloats over my downfall. The white wraith conjured up by the thought of those fateful letters fills me with a mad fury, and I long to dash that hateful bureau into a thousand pieces and flee the house.
But the demolition could not be executed noiselessly, and the situation is perilous enough already for a man of my delicately organized constitution, with a heart that runs down with a rumble like a Waterbury movement; so I think I won't break the bureau.
I renew my mad search for the missing drawer, that seems to be of a most retiring disposition, as drawers go. I bethink me of stories of missing treasure: how the hero counted off twenty paces across the floor, and then dropped his dagger so that its blade would be imbedded in the wood, and then dug through several tons of masonry, until he found a casket, sometimes of steel, sometimes of iron, and sometimes of both.
And then he did a lot more mathematical calculating, and pressed a knob, and there you are! Ah! a thought—I had forgotten to apply myself to the moulding of the bureau, as a hero of the middle ages would have done under the circumstances.