The time elapsed.  Fields put his watch into his pocket.

“Well, sir?” said he.

“We accept the terms,” replied the president, bowing stiffly.

Fields also bowed.  A silence ensued.  Presently a director said to Fields: 

“May I ask you what led you to this step?”

“Sir,” replied the teller, with severity, “you are encroaching upon our contract.  I may speak of this affair, but you have no right to.”

Then he turned to the board: 

“Do you wish me to go back to my work?”

There was a consultation.  Then the president said: 

“If you will be so kind.”

Fields complied.

The business of the day went forward as usual.  The teller’s counter-desk was supplied with money, and no suspicion was aroused among his fellows.

As each director went out of the bank, he stopped at Fields’s window, and addressed some set remark to him upon business matters; and so intimate did the relations between them seem that the clerks concluded that the lucky man was about to be made cashier, and they began to pay him more respect.

In the intervening night there again recurred to the directors the enormity of the outrage to which they had been subjected.  The incident of recovering so large a part of what they had originally supposed was gone had the effect of making them partially unmindful of the loss of the smaller sum which the teller finally agreed to accept in place of punishment.  But in the lapse between the time of the robbery and the time of the promised restitution, their appreciation of their position had time to revive again, and when they assembled on the next morning to receive the money from Fields, they were anxious and feverish.

Would he come?  Was he not at this moment in Canada?  Would a man who could steal one hundred thousand dollars return a quarter of a million?  Absurd!

Every moment one of them went to the door to see if Fields had appeared.  The rest walked about, with their hands behind them, talking together incoherently.  The air was full of doubts.  The teller usually came at a quarter past nine, but the hour arrived without the man.  Intolerable suspense!

Two or three of the directors made paths for themselves amid the chairs, and anxiously traversed them.  Slavin took a post beside a window and gazed into the street.  Debritt, with his right hand in his bosom, and with his left grasping the upper rail of a seat, looked fixedly into the coals.  Stuart sipped at a goblet of water, but his trembling hand caused him to spill its contents upon the floor.  No one now ventured to speak except in a whisper; it seemed that a word or a loud noise must disturb the poise of matters.  The clock ticked, the blue flames murmured in the grate, and the pellets of sand thrown up by the wind rattled against the windows.

But yet there were no signs of the paying teller.