The director fidgeted with his chair and finally moved towards the door. “I think you will get along better with him alone,” said he. “He is a man who very easily gets embarrassed, and has a way of acting as if he were afraid of me. I will just step outside while you talk to him.” But Mr. Sylvester with a sudden dark flush on his brow, hastily stopped him. “I beg you will not,” said he, with a quick realization of what Hopgood might be led to say in the forthcoming interview, if he were not restrained by the presence of the director. “Hopgood is not so afraid of you that he will not answer every question that is put to him with straightforward frankness.” And he pushed up a chair, with a smile that Mr. Stuyvesant evidently found himself unable to resist. The screen trembled slightly, but none of them noticed it; Mr. Sylvester at once rang for Hopgood. He came in panting with his hurried descent from the fifth story, his face flushed and his eyes rolling, but without any of the secret perturbation Bertram had observed in them on a former occasion. “He cannot help us,” was the thought that darkened the young man’s brow as his eyes left the janitor, and faltering towards his uncle, fell upon the table before him. Everything was reflected in the mirror. “Well, Hopgood, I have a few questions to put to you this morning,” said Mr. Sylvester in a restrained, but not unkindly tone. The worthy man bowed, bestowed a salutatory roll of his eyes on Mr. Stuyvesant, and stood deferentially waiting. “No, he cannot help us,” was again Bertram’s thought, and again his eyes faltered to his uncle’s face, and again fell anxiously before him. “It has not been my habit to trouble you with inquiries about your management of matters under your charge,” continued Mr. Sylvester, stopping till the janitor’s wandering eyes settled upon his own. “Your conduct has always been exemplary, and your attention to duty satisfactory; but I would like to ask you to-day if you have observed anything amiss with the vaults of late? anything wrong about the boxes kept there? anything in short, that excited your suspicion or caused you to ask yourself if everything was as it should be?” The janitor’s ruddy face grew pale, and his eye fell with startled inquiry on Mr. Harrington’s box that still occupied the centre of the table. “No, sir,” he emphatically replied, “has anything—” But Mr. Sylvester did not wait to be questioned. “You have attended to your duties as promptly and conscientiously as usual; you have allowed no one to go to the vaults day or night, who had no business there? You have not relaxed your accustomed vigilance, or left the bank alone at any time during the hours it is under your charge?” “No sir, not for a minute, sir; that is—” He stopped and his eye wandered towards Mr. Stuyvesant. “Never for a minute, sir,” he went on, “without I knew some one was in the bank, who was capable of looking after it.”