really heard rapidly to close, before the young damsel had got down the first ten steps.
Cornelius was very uneasy about it, but it was, after all, only a prelude to greater anxieties.
The following day passed without any remarkable incident. Gryphus made his three visits, and discovered nothing. He never came at the same hours, as he hoped thus to discover the secrets of the prisoner. Van Baerle, therefore, had devised a contrivance, a sort of pulley, by means of which he was able to lower or to raise his jug below the ledge of tiles and stone before his window. The strings by which this was effected, he had found means to cover with that moss which generally grows on tiles, or in the crannies of the walls.
Gryphus suspected nothing, and the device succeeded for eight days. One morning, however, when Cornelius, absorbed in the contemplation of his bulb, from which a germ of vegetation was already peeping forth, had not heard old Gryphus coming up stairs, as a gale of wind was blowing which shook the whole tower, the door suddenly opened.
Gryphus, perceiving an unknown and consequently a forbidden object in the hands of his prisoner, pounced upon it, with the same rapidity as the hawk on its prey.
As ill luck would have it, his coarse, hard hand, the same which he had broken, and which Cornelius Van Baerle had set so well, grasped at once in the midst of the jug on the spot where the bulb was lying in the soil.
“What have you got here?” he roared. “Ah! hare I caught you?” and with this he grubbed in the soil.
“I? nothing, nothing,” cried Cornelius, trembling.
“Ah! have I caught you? a jug, and earth in it, there is some criminal secret at the bottom of all this.”
