This sign signified, “You are responsible for this man.”

The detective needed no admonition to make him keep a strict watch.  His suspicions were too vague, his desire for success was too ardent, for him to lose sight of Prosper an instant.

Closely following the cashier, he seated himself in a dark corner of the room, and, pretending to be sleepy, he fixed himself in a comfortable position for taking a nap, gaped until his jaw-bone seemed about to be dislocated, then closed his eyes, and kept perfectly quiet.

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.”

His note written, Prosper folded it carefully into the smallest possible size, and after furtively glancing toward the detective, who remained motionless in his corner, threw it across the desk to little Cavaillon with this one word: 

“Gypsy!”

All this was so quickly and skilfully done that Fanferlot was confounded, and began to feel a little uneasy.

“The devil take him!” said he to himself; “for a suffering innocent this young dandy has more pluck and nerve than many of my oldest customers.  This, however, shows the result of education!”

Yes:  innocent or guilty, Prosper must have been endowed with great self-control and power of dissimulation to affect this presence of mind at a time when his honor, his future happiness, all that he held dear in life, were at stake.  And he was only thirty years old.

Either from natural deference, or from the hope of gaining some ray of light by a private conversation, the commissary determined to speak to the banker before acting decisively.