"Oh, Roy!" said Bracebridge, with a vehemence that was almost passion, "let me do it. Let me do it for you. You know my father. You know that he has every confidence in me; he is not a crank, and----"
"Stop, Ambrose," said Roy, "I can not allow you, even by implication, to speak disrespectfully of my father. That I do not understand his motives is true. That it is mighty hard on me is equally true, but he is my father."
"There!" said the other in dismay. "I am always putting my foot into it. Forgive me. I didn't mean anything; indeed I did not. Oh! Roy, you know what I mean. Let me help you out of this. It's as easy as A-B-C, you know. No one need know. Pshaw! one would be a poor friend, if, when quite able, he should hang back."
"Thanks, dear old fellow. Many thanks. We will see. We will see. If it comes to the worst, I won't hesitate to talk to you again about this. In the meantime we will drop it for the present."
With this Ambrose had to be content. The two friends then rapped at the President's door.
Upon the whole, Roy Henning was well pleased with the manner in which the boys had received him. Over-sensitive as he was, he had expected that they would either accuse him of complicity, or openly blame him for the loss of the money. Taken altogether, they behaved remarkably well. The majority had real sympathy for him in the awkward position in which he found himself.
With a fine regard for his feelings, no one, after Roy's first announcement of his probable incapacity to refund, mentioned openly to him the question of restitution. Everybody understood that the President had arrived at some decision on this point, but all were in the dark as to its nature.
The days passed into weeks. Every effort was made to trace the thief, but without success. It became finally the general conclusion that some outsider, in no way connected with the college, was the culprit, and that he had gotten off safely with his booty. But in the many impromptu committees, organized in moments of unusual zeal for the purpose of "doing something," the unanswerable difficulty always arose--"How could a stranger know there was money in that particular room of the dozens in the college?"
The pitcher's cage was not purchased that winter. It was noticed by the boys that Andrew Garrett, as far as they could observe, never once spoke to his cousin about the loss. Roy, owing to the result of the thoughts of the sleepless night he had spent in the infirmary, imagined that Garrett had good reasons for keeping clear of him.