HELD TO ANSWER (continued 5)

There was even excitement in attending the church, because one never knew who would be sitting next,—some famous personage or some notorious one,—for Doctor Hampstead won his friends and admirers from the strangest sources imaginable.

As to pulpit eloquence, there was admittedly seldom a flash of it at All People's. By an enormous digestive feat, John had assimilated that seminary course of which the Dean had spoken, boasting that he read his Greek Testament entirely through in the three years, upon the street cars that plied between his home and the seat of theological learning. But this did not make of Hampstead a strong preacher, although the impression that he might be, if he chose, was unescapable. His passion, he declared, was not to preach the gospel but to do the gospel. People sat before him spellbound, not by his eloquence, but by a sense of mysterious spiritual forces at work about them. At times, the mere exhalations of the man's sunny personality seemed sufficient to account for all his influence; at others there was that mysterious feeling of the Presence.

But as the membership grew and the sphere of its pastor's influence extended, there began to be less and less of his personality left for expenditure upon that "backbone of the church" which had been there longest and felt it first.

More than once Elder Burbeck took occasion to voice a protest over this. John put these protests aside mildly until one day, when the minister's nerves had been more than usually frazzled by a series of petty annoyances, the Elder blunderingly declared that the church paid the minister his salary and was entitled to have his services.

"Is that the way you look at it?" asked John sharply. "That you pay me my salary? Then don't ever put another coin in the contribution box. I thought you gave the money to God, and God gave it to me. I do not acknowledge to you or to any member of this church one single obligation except to be true in your or their soul's relation. I owe you neither obedience nor coddling nor back-smoothing."

"But you don't realize," urged the Elder. "These things were well enough when our church was small. But now it is big. It occupies a dignified position in the community, and all this riff-raff that you are running after—"

"Riff-raff!" John exploded. "Jesus gathered his disciples from the riff-raff! His message was to the riff-raff! He said: 'Leave the avenues and boulevards and go unto the riff-raff!' What is any church but riff-raff redeemed? What is any sanctimonious, self-satisfied Pharisee but a soul on the way to make riff-raff of himself again? What gave this church its dignified position in the community? Did you, when you nailed the plank across the door?"

Elder Burbeck flushed redder than ever and turned stiffly on his heel, not only inflamed by the crushing sarcasm of this rebuke, but stolidly accepting it as one more evidence that in his heart this minister of All People's was much more human and much less godlike than many gaping people seemed to think. Both the resentment and the inference the Elder stored up carefully against a day which he felt that he could see advancing, while the minister, too intent upon his work to scan the horizon for a cloud, hurried away upon another of his errands to the riff-raff.

With this fanatic ardor of personal service now highly developed, it was inevitable that the appeal in the eyes of Marien Dounay should act like a challenge upon the chivalrous nature of John Hampstead.

CHAPTER XXI

A CRY OF DISTRESS

At the close of the service, Doctor Hampstead moved freely and affectionately among his people, according to his habit. To the Angel of the Chair, who during all these five years had been his spiritual intimate and practical counselor, until in his regard she stood frankly canonized, went the last hearty handclasp, after which the minister hurried to where the actress still waited in her pew. Save for a dapple-whiskered janitor tactfully busy in the far-off loft of the choir, the two were alone in the large auditorium.

"Miss Dounay," John began in sincere tones, extending his hand cordially, "I congratulate you heartily on the splendid success that you have won."

He felt a sense of real triumph in his heart, that after what had passed between them he was able to greet her like this in all sincerity, although she had helped greatly by receiving him with that odd look of worshipfulness which he had discerned from the distance of the pulpit.

"Thank you, but please do not congratulate me," the actress exclaimed quickly, while a look of pain came undisguised into her eyes, and with a mere shrug of those expressive shoulders she hurled aside all pretense at formal amenities. "Oh, Doctor Hampstead," she began, breathing his name in tones of respect that deepened into reverence, and frankly confessing herself a woman in acute distress by adding impulsively:

"I have gained everything we once talked about, and yet I believe I am the unhappiest woman in the world."

There was almost a sob in her voice as she uttered the words, and the minister looked at her intently, with his face more gravely sympathetic than usual.

"I am trying to revive something," she hurried on, as if there was relief in thus hastily declaring herself, "trying to get back something. You alone can help me. My happiness, my very life, it seems to me, depends upon you. Will you come to see me this afternoon at the Hotel St. Albans, say at four?"

"I should like to," responded the minister frankly, his desire to help her growing rapidly; "but I have a funeral this afternoon."

"Then to-night," the actress urged, "after your sermon is done?"

As if anxious to forestall refusal, she gave him no chance to reply, but continued with some display of her old vivacity of spirit: "We will have a supper, as we did that night you came in after the play. Julie is still with me, and another maid, and a secretary, and sometimes my 'personal representative.' Oh, I have quite a retinue now! Do say you will come, even though it is an unseemly hour for a ministerial call," she pleaded, and again her eyes were eloquent.

But it was not the hour that made John hesitate. He felt himself immune from charges of indiscretion. He knew that despite his youthful thirty years, he seemed ages older than the oldest of his congregation, a man removed from every possibility of error; one whose simple, open life of day-by-day devotion to the good of all who sought him seemed in itself a sufficient armor-proof against mischance.

He came and went, in the upper and in the underworld, almost as he would; saw whom he would and where he would. Jails, theaters, hotels, questionable side entrances, boulevards and alleys were accustomed to the sight of his comings and goings. If the stalwart figure of the man loomed at midnight in a dance hall on the Barbary Coast of San Francisco or in the darkest alleys of an Oakland water-front saloon, his presence was remarked, but his purpose was never doubted. He was there for the good of some one, to save some girl, to haul back some mother's boy, to fight side by side with some man against his besetting sin, whether it be wine or woman, or the gaming table. Therefore he could go to call on Marien Dounay at ten o'clock at night at the Hotel St. Albans as freely as on a brother minister at noon.

What had made him suddenly withhold his acceptance of the invitation was the entry of something of the old lightness of spirit into her tones for a moment, accompanied by the suggestion of a supper. He knew enough of the whimsical obliquities of Marien Dounay's nature to appreciate that he must meet her socially in order to minister to her spiritually; but he did not propose that the solemn purposes of his call should be made an opportunity for entertainment or personal display.

However, Marien had instantly divined her mistake. "Doctor Hampstead!" she began afresh, and this time her voice was low and her utterance rapid. "My season closed in New York last Saturday night. I was compelled to wait over three days to sign the contract for my London engagement. The moment that was out of the way, I rushed entirely across this country to see you! I arrived this morning. I came here at once. Oh, I must talk to you immediately and disabuse your mind of something—something terrible that I have waited five years to wipe out."

She clasped her hands nervously, and her luminous eyes grew misty, while she seemed in danger of losing her composure entirely, an unheard-of thing for Marien Dounay.

Her imploring looks and the impetuous earnestness of her appeal were already leading John to self-reproach for the sudden hardening of his judgment upon her; but it was the last sentence that decided him. He knew well enough what she meant, and something in him deeper than the minister leaped at it. If she could wipe out that grisly memory, the earliest opportunity was due her, and it would relieve him exactly as if a smirch had been wiped from the brow of womanhood itself. Besides, there had always been to him something puzzling and incomprehensible about that scene in the restaurant, which, as the years went by, was more and more like a horrible dream than an actual experience.

"I will come, Miss Dounay," he assured her gravely.

"Oh, I am so glad!" the woman exclaimed with a little outstretching of her hand, which would have fallen upon John's on the back of the pew, if it had not been raised at the moment in a gesture of negation as he said:

"But please omit the supper. I am coming at your call—eagerly—happily—but not even as an old friend; solely as a minister!"

This speech was so subtly modulated as to make its meaning clear, without the shadow of offense, and Marien's humbly grateful manner of receiving it indicated tacit acknowledgment of the exact nature of the visit.

Nevertheless, the minister found that in thus specifying he had written for himself a prescription larger than he could fill. Between the whiles of his busy afternoon and evening he was conscious of growing feelings of curiosity and personal interest that threatened to engulf the loftier object of his intended call. Old memories would revive themselves; old emotions would surge again. The spirit of adventure and the spice of expectancy thrust themselves into his thought, so that it was with a half-guilty feeling that he found himself at the hour appointed in the hotel corridor outside her room. He was minded to go back, but stood still instead, reproaching himself for cowardice. His very uncertainty gave him a feeling of littleness.

Eternal Loyalty was still and forever to be his guiding principle; and should he not be as true to this actress who had appealed to, him, who perhaps was to tell him something that would prove she had a right to appeal to him, as to any other needy one? Should he shrink because of the irresistible feeling that it was more as a man interested in a woman than as a priest to confess a soul, that he found himself before her door? Should all of his experience go for nothing, and was his character, strengthened by years and chastened by some bitter lessons, still so undependable that he dared not put himself to the test of this woman, even though her mysterious power was so great that she could command a man's love and deserve his hate, yet send him away from her without a hurt and feeling admiration mingled with his horror!

For a man with John Hampstead's chivalrous nature to put a question like this to himself was to answer it in the affirmative. Temptation comes to the minister as to other men, and it had come to John. But had not Marien Dounay herself taught him of what weakness to beware? That flesh is flesh? That juxtaposition is danger? Besides, should not the disastrous consequences which had followed from his contacts with the woman have made him forever immune from the effect of her presence?

John approached and knocked upon the door.

His knock was greeted with a sound like the purr of an expectant kitten, and the knob was turned by Marien herself, with a sudden vigor which indicated that she had bounded instantly to admit him.

Her manner, in most startling contrast to that which she had displayed at the church, was sparklingly vivacious; but her dress was more disconcerting than her manner; in fact, to the minister, it seemed that very same negligee gown whose pleats of shimmering black with their splotches of red, had clung so closely to her form in those never-to-be-forgotten hours in the little apartment on Turk Street in San Francisco. Her hair, too, flowed unconfined as then. The picture called up overwhelming memories, against which the minister in the man struggled valiantly.

"I have not worn it since, until to-night," the woman purred softly, happy as a child over his glance of recognition; but when Hampstead, in uncompromising silence, stood surveying her critically, she asked archly and a bit anxiously, "Are you shocked?"

"Well," he replied a trifle severely, "you must admit that this is not sackcloth and ashes."

"It is my soul, not my body, that is in mourning," Marien urged apologetically, trying the effect of a melting glance, after which, walking half the length of the room she turned again and invited him to lay off his overcoat and be seated. John could not resist the playful calculation of her manner without seeming heartless; and yet he did resist it, standing noncommittally while his eyes sought the circumference of the room inquiringly.

"And look!" went on Marien enthusiastically, for she was trying pitifully by sheer force of personality to recreate the atmosphere of their old relationship in its happiest moments. "See, here is the Roman chair, or at least one like it; and there the divan, piled high with cushions; I am as fond of cushions as ever. You shall sit where you sat; I shall recline where I reclined. We will stage the old scene again."

"Not the old scene," replied the minister, with quiet emphasis, feeling just a little as if he had been trapped.

Still his strength was always sapped on Sunday night; and no doubt in utter weariness, one's power of resistance is somewhat lowered. Besides, Marien was so beautiful and so winning in manner; her arms gleamed so softly in their circle of silk and filmy lace, and there was in the atmosphere of the room an abundance of an indefinable something which was like a rare perfume and yet was not a perfume at all, but that effect of lure and challenge which her mere presence always had upon the senses of this man.

Moreover, it seemed so fitting to see this exquisite creature happy instead of sad that it would have taken a coarser nature than John Hampstead's to break in brutally upon her whimsical happiness of mood. He judged it therefore the mere part of tact to remove his overcoat.

"Julie!" called Marien, and there was a not entirely suppressed note of triumph in her tone.

The little French maid appeared with suspicious promptness from behind swinging portières to receive the coat and to give the big man, whom she had always liked, shy welcome upon her own account.

True to her nature, Miss Dounay's every movement was theatric. She stood complacently by until the maid had done her service and withdrawn. Then pointing to the Roman chair, she said to Hampstead:

"Sit there and wait. I have something to show you, something beautiful—wonderful—overwhelming almost!"

Hesitating only long enough to see that the minister, although a bit suspicious, complied politely with her request, Marien, with dramatic directness, and humming the while a teasing little tune, followed Julie out through the portières, but in passing swung the curtains wide as an invitation to her caller's eyes to pursue her to where she stopped before a chiffonier which was turned obliquely across the corner of the large inner room.

Marien's shoulder was toward John, but the mirror beyond framed her face exquisitely, with its hood of flowing hair and the expansive whiteness of her bosom to the corsage, while the long dark lashes painted a feathery shadow upon her cheeks as her eyes looked downward to something before her on the chiffonier. For a moment she stood motionless, as if charmed by the sight on which their glance rested. Then, using both hands, she lifted the object, and instantly the mirror flashed to the watching man the picture of a swaying rope of diamonds. They seemed to him an aurora-borealis of jewels, sparkling more brilliantly than the light of Marien's eyes, as she held them before her face for an instant, and then, with a graceful movement which magnified the beauty of her rounded arms and the smoothly-chiseled column of her throat, threw back the close-lying strands of her hair to fasten the chain behind her neck.

For another second the mirror showed her patting her bosom complacently, as if her white fingers were loving the diamonds into the form of a perfect crescent, which, presently attained, she surveyed with evident satisfaction. Turning, she advanced toward her guest with hands at first uplifted and then clasped before her in an ecstasy of delight, while she laughed musically, like a child intoxicated by the joy of some long anticipated pleasure.

Upon a man whose love of beauty was as great as John Hampstead's, the effect was shrewdly calculated and the result all that heaven had intended.

"Wonderful!" he exclaimed, leaping up to meet her as she advanced. "Splendid! Magnificent!"

Each adjective was more emphatically uttered than the last.

Satisfied beyond measure with the effect of her diversion, the calculating woman drew close with a complete return of all her old assurance and stood like a radiant statue, a happy flush heightening on her cheeks, while the minister, entirely unabashed, feasted his eyes frankly on the beauty of the jewels and the snowy softness of their setting. When, after a moment, Marien made use of his hand as a support on which to pivot gracefully about and let herself down with dainty elegance into the midst of her throne of cushions, Hampstead stood, a little lost, gazing downward at the vision as though spellbound by its loveliness.

For a moment the actress was supremely confident. Breathing softly, her dark eyes swimming like pools of liquid light, into which her long lashes cast a fringe of foliate shadows, she contemplated John Hampstead, tall, strong, clean, healthful looking, his yellow hair, his high-arched viking brows, the look of kindliness and the cast of nobility into which the years had moulded his features, until it seemed to her that she must spring up and drag him down to her lair of cushions like a prize.

But she made no impulsive move. Instead, she breathed softly: "Doctor Hampstead, will you touch that button, please?"

John complied courteously, but mechanically, as if charmed. The more brilliant lights in the room were instantly extinguished. What remained flowed from the shrouding red silk of the table lamp so softly that while all objects in the room remained clearly distinguishable even to their detail, there was not a garish beam anywhere.

It was a fitting atmosphere for confession, and even the diamonds in this smothered light seemed suddenly to grow communicative, to multiply their luster, and to break more readily into the prismatic elements of color.

"More and more beautiful," Hampstead murmured, passing a hand across his brow.

"Sit down!" Marien breathed softly, motioning toward the Roman chair.

Hampstead was surprised to find how near the divan the inanimate chair appeared to have removed itself. Had he pushed it absently with his leg, as he made place for her, or had she, or had the thing itself—insensate wood and leather and plush—felt, too, the irresistible thrall of this magnetic, beauty-dowered creature who snuggled amid these silken panniers?

"I do not know diamonds very well," the minister confessed, sinking down into the chair.

"Look at them," Marien said, with a delightful note of intimacy in her voice, at the same time lowering her chin close, in order to survey the jewels as they lay upon her breast.

In John's eyes, this downcast glance gave Marien an expression that was Madonna-like and holy, and this again deepened his feeling of pity for her heartaches, and his anxiety to help her in what it was her whim to mask from him for the moment with all this childish play of interest in her jewels and in her own beauty. But it also disposed him to humor her the more, removing all sense of restraint when he followed the glance of her eye to where the more brilliant stones of the pendant lay in the snowy vale of her bosom, or when, leaning closer still, he could see that their intermittent flashing facets were responding to the pulsing of her heart.

"And what is the amber stone?" he asked innocently.

"Amber!" Marien laughed. "It is a canary diamond, the finest stone of all. It alone cost four thousand dollars."

"Four thousand dollars!" The minister drew in his breath slowly. "It had not occurred to me that there were such jewels outside of royal crowns and detective stories," he stammered. "Four thousand dollars! What did the whole necklace cost?"

"Twenty-two," the actress answered almost boastfully, again bending to survey the blazing inverted arch of jewels.

"Thousand?" The minister's inflection expressed his incredulousness.

"Thousand," Marien iterated with a complacent drop of the voice, and then, while the fingers of one hand toyed with the pendant, went on: "I have a perfect passion for diamonds! That canary stone has temperament, life almost. Perhaps it is a whim of mine, but it seems to me that it reflects my moods. When I am downcast, it is dull and lusterless; when I am happy, it flashes brilliantly, like a blazing sun.

"It is influenced by those whom I am with. It never burned so brilliantly as now. Your presence has an effect upon it. Cup your fingers and hold it for a moment, and see, after an interval, if its luster does not change."

Astonished at the feeling of easy intimacy which had been established between them so completely that he saw no reason at all why he should refuse, Hampstead did as he was bidden, although to hold the brilliant stone it was necessary for the heads of the two to be drawn very close, so that the tawny, wavy, loose-lying locks of the minister and the dark glistening mass of the woman's hair were all but intertwined, while the four eyes converged upon the diamond, and the two bodies were breathless and poised with watching.

Presently the man felt his vision swimming. He saw no single jewel, but a myriad of lights. He ceased to feel the gem in his hollowed fingers, and was conscious instead of a soft, magnetic glow upon the under side of his hand.

In the same instant, he became aware that Marien's eyes no longer watched the stone, but were bent upon his face, and he felt a breath upon his cheek as her lips parted, and she murmured softly:

"John."

This word and touch together gave instant warning to the Reverend Doctor Hampstead of the spell under which he was passing,—a spell mixed in equal parts from the responsiveness of his own nature to all beauty of form, animate or inanimate, and from the subtle sympathy which the rich, seductive personality of Marien Dounay had swiftly conjured. The shock of this discovery was entirely sufficient to break the potency of the charm.

"It did seem to change, I thought," the minister said casually, at the same time slipping his hand gently from beneath the jewel.

By the slightly altered tone in his speech and the easy resumption of his pose in the chair, Marien perceived that the minister and his purpose was again uppermost in her caller.

As for John, slightly irritated with himself, and yet feeling it still the part of tact to show no irritation with Marien, he guided the situation safely past its moment of restraint.

"You said there was something you wished to tell me," he reminded her gently; then added gravely: "That is why I came to-night. I was to be your father-confessor."

The considerateness of Hampstead's tone and manner was as impressive as it was compelling. Marien's face became instantly sober, and she fidgeted for a time in silence as if it were increasingly difficult to broach the subject, but finally she labored out:

"You misunderstood me horribly once—horribly!"

With this much communicated, she stopped as abruptly as she had begun, while a frightened look invaded her liquid eyes.

"Misunderstood you," Hampstead iterated gently, but with firmness, "I understood you so well that except through an impersonal desire to be helpful, I should never have come here."

The very dignity and measured self-restraint of the minister's utterance robbed the woman of her usual admirable self-mastery. She cowered with timid face amid her pillows, as her mind leaped back to that night in the restaurant with Litschi, and the terrible lengths to which she had gone to shock this same big, dynamic, ardent Hampstead from his pursuit of her.

As if it were compromising himself to sit silent while he read her thoughts and heard again in his own ears that terrible speech, the minister went on to say sternly:

"You know that I shrank then, as from a loathsome thing, at the price you were willing to pay for your success. I must forewarn you that the memory does not seem less abhorrent now than the fact did then."

When Hampstead bit out these sentences with a fire of moral intensity burning in his eyes, the quivering figure upon the cushions shuddered and shrank.

"Oh, John!" a broken voice pleaded. "Did I ever, ever say those hateful words? Can you not conceive that they were false? That they were spoken with intent to deceive you, to drive you from me, to leave me free to make my way alone, unhampered, as I knew I must?"

The minister, his face still white and stern, his gray eyes beaming straight through widening lids, declared hotly: "No! I cannot conceive that a good woman would voluntarily smirch herself like that in the eyes of a man who loved her for any other single purpose than the one which she confessed, an ambition that was inordinate and—immoral. That thought was in your speech, and by Heaven"—he shook an accusing finger at her—"I believe it was in your purpose!"

The woman cowered for a moment longer before Hampstead's gaze, then a single dry sob broke from her, while one hand covered her eyes, and the other stretched gropingly to him, across the pillows.

"I had the purpose," she admitted haltingly. "I confess it. Is it not pitiful?" and the lily hand which had felt its way so pleadingly across the embroidered cushions opened and closed its fingers on nothing, with a movement that was convulsive and appealing beyond words.

"Pitiful," the minister groaned. "My God, it is tragic!"

"Yes," she went on presently, in a calmer voice that was more resigned and sadly reminiscent: "I purposed it."

And there she stopped. Her tone was as dry as ashes. This man had surprised her by revealing a startling amount of moral force, which had quickly and easily broken down her coolly conceived purpose to make him believe that his sense of hearing had played him false that night in the restaurant. She had, however, confessed only to what she knew he knew; but the roused conscience of the preacher of righteousness detected this and was not to be evaded. He proposed to confront this woman with her sin.

"You confess only to the purpose?" John demanded accusingly.

The glance of the woman fell before his blazing eye. She had meant to answer boldly, triumphantly; but the sudden fear that she might not be believed made her a coward, and forced the realization that she must not attempt to deceive this man in anything.

"Sometimes one says more than one is able to perform," she whispered weakly. "Sometimes a woman names a price, and does not know what the price means, and when the time of settlement comes, will not pay it—cannot pay it—because there is something in her deeper, more overruling than her own conscious will, something that refuses to be betrayed!" The last words were torn out of her throat with desperate emphasis.

John sat watching the woman critically, with an all but unfriendly eye, while she struggled over this utterance, yet the very manner of it compelled him to believe in her absolute sincerity at the moment. Her revelation was truthful, no doubt, but just what was she revealing? The substance was so contrary to his presumption that his comprehension was slow.

"You mean," he began doubtfully—

Marien took instant courage in his doubt; he was almost convinced.

"I mean," she exclaimed, leaping up with an expansive gesture of her arms, while the jewels, like her eyes, blazed with the intensity of her emotion: "I mean that I never paid the price!" Her voice broke into a wild crescendo of laughter that was half delirious in its mingled triumph and joy. Hampstead himself arose involuntarily and stood with a look first of amazement, and then almost of anger, as he suddenly seized her wrists, holding them close in his powerful grasp, while he demanded in tones hoarse with a pleading that was in contrast to his manner:

"Marien, are you telling me the truth?"

The woman faced his searching gaze doubtfully for an instant; then seeing that the man was actually anxious to believe her, she swayed toward him, weakened by relief and joy, as she cried impulsively:

"It is the truth! It is the truth! Oh, God knows it is the truth!"

The fierceness of the minister's grip upon her wrists instantly relaxed, and he lowered her gently to the cushions, where she sat overcome by her emotions while he stood gazing at her as on one brought back from the dead, expressions of wonder and thanksgiving mingled upon his face.

But presently a reminiscent look came into Marien's eyes, and she began to speak rapidly, as if eager to confirm her vindication by the summary of her experiences.

"It was hard, very hard," she began. "It commenced in that first careless, ignorant year I told you about. I was fighting it all the time; fighting it when you were with me. That was really why I broke out of Mowrey's Company. Men—such beasts of men!—proffered their help continually, but not upon terms that I could accept. It seemed, eventually, that I must surrender. I taught myself to think that some day, perhaps when I stood at last upon the very threshold—" she paused and looked over her shoulder at some unseen terror. "But the time never came. I burst through the barriers ahead of my pursuing fears."

The actress ceased to speak and sat breathing quickly, as if from the effects of an exhausting chase.

Hampstead turned and walked to the window, where, throwing up the sash, he stood filling his lungs deeply with delicious, refreshing draughts of the outside air. Coming back, he halted before her to say in tones of earnest conviction:

"Marien"—he had called her Marien!—"I feel as if the burden of years had been removed. Few things have ever lain upon my heart with a more oppressive sense of the awful than this vision of you, so beautiful and so possessed of genius, consecrating yourself with such noble devotion to a lofty, artistic aim, and yet prepared to—to—" His words faded to a horrified whisper, and finding himself unable to conclude the sentence, he reached down and took her hand in both of his, shaking it emotionally while he was able presently to say reverently and with unction:

"God has preserved you, Marien. You owe Him everything."

"It was you who preserved me," she amended, with jealous emphasis and that look again of hungry devotion which he had seen first in the church. "It is you to whom I owe everything."

"I preserved you?" Hampstead asked, now completely mystified, as he remembered with what scornful words and looks she had whipped him from her presence. "I do not understand. We pass from mystery to mystery. Is it that which you said you must tell me?"

"No. I have told you what I wanted to tell you."

The woman was again entirely at her ease, shrugging her beautiful shoulders and yawning lazily,—a carefully-staged and cat-like yawn, in which she appeared for an instant to show sharp teeth and claws, and then as suddenly to bury them in velvet.

The minister stood gazing at her doubtfully.

CHAPTER XXII

PURSUIT BEGINS

Both recognized that the time had come to close the interview, and each was extremely pleased with its result. Marien had demonstrated to her complete satisfaction that this minister was still a man; that his flesh was wax and would therefore melt. She believed that to-night she had seen it soften.

As for John: He believed that this evening had witnessed a triumph for his tact and his moral force. His sympathy was wholly with the woman. Convinced afresh that there was something sublime in her character, he determined to give her every opportunity to reveal herself to him, and to spare no effort upon his own account to redeem her life from that ingrowing selfishness which he felt sure was making her unhappy now and might ultimately rob her of all joy in its most splendid achievements.

"I shall save three o'clock to-morrow for you," Miss Dounay proposed, as if reading the minister's purpose in his eye.

But John Hampstead was a man of many duties, whose time was not easy to command.

"At three," he objected, "I am to address a mother's meeting.

"At four then," Marien suggested, with an engaging smile.

"At four I have to go with a sad-hearted man to see his son in the county jail," John explained apologetically, as he scanned his date book.

"At five!" persisted Marien, the smile giving way before a shadow of impatience.

John laughed.

"It must seem funny to you," he declared, "but I have an engagement at five-thirty which makes it impossible to be here at five. The engagement itself would seem funnier still; but to me it is not funny—only one of the tragedies into which my life is continually drawn. At that hour I am to visit a poor woman who lives on a house boat on the canal. Monday is her husband's pay day, and he invariably reaches home on that night inflamed with liquor, and abuses the woman outrageously. I have promised to be with her when he comes in. I may wait an hour, and I may wait half the night."

"Oh," gasped Marien, with a note of apprehension. "And suppose he turns his violence on you?"

"Why, then I shall defend myself," John answered, good-humoredly, "but without hurting Olaf."

"I am likely to spend the night on that canal boat," he added, "and in the morning Olaf will be ashamed and perhaps penitent. He may thank me and ask me to meet him at the factory gate next Monday night and walk home with him to make sure that his pay envelope gets safely past the door of intervening saloons."

"But why so much concern about unimportant people like that?" questioned Marien, her eyes big with curiosity and wonder.

"Any person in need is important to me," confessed John modestly.

"But how can you spare the time from the regular work of the church?"

"That is my regular work."

Marien paused a moment as if baffled.

"But—but I thought a minister's work was to preach—so eloquently that people will not get drunk; to pray, so earnestly that God will make men strong enough to resist temptation."

"But suppose," smiled John, "that I am God's answer to prayer, his means of helping Olaf to resist temptation. That is the mission of my church, at least that is my ideal for it; not a group of heaven-bound joy-riders, but a life-saving crew. There are twenty men in my church who would meet Olaf at a word from me and walk home with him every night till he felt able to get by the swinging doors upon his own will."

Marien's eyes were shining with a new light.

"That is practical religion," she declared.

"Cut out the modifier," amended John. "That is religion! There are," he went on, "even some in my congregation who would take my watch upon the canal boat; but I prefer to go myself because—"

"Because," Marien broke in suddenly, "because it is dangerous." Her glance was full of a new admiration for the quiet-speaking man before her, in whose eyes burned that light of almost fanatical ardor which she and others had marked before.

"More because it is a delicate responsibility," the minister amended once more. "Tact that comes with experience is essential, as well as strength."

"And do you do many things like that?" Marien asked, deeply impressed.

"Each day is like a quilt of crazy patchwork," John laughed, and then added earnestly: "You would hardly believe the insight I get into lives of every sort and at every stage of human experience, divorces, quarrels, feuds, hatreds, crimes, loves, collapses of health or character or finance—crises of one sort or another, that make people lean heavily upon a man who is disinterestedly and sympathetically helpful."

"And your reward for all this busybodying?" the actress finally asked, at the same time forcing a laugh, as if trying to make light of what had compelled her to profound thought.

"A sufficient reward," answered John happily, "is the grateful regard in which hundreds, and I think I may even say thousands, of people throughout the city hold me: this, and the ever-widening doors of opportunity are my reward. These things could lift poorer clay than mine and temper it like steel. The people lean upon me. I could never fail them, and they could never fail me."

The exalted confidence of the man, as he uttered these last words, which were yet without egotism, suggested the tapping of vast reservoirs of spiritual force, and as before, this awed Marien a little; but it also aroused a petty note in her nature, filling her with a jealousy like that she had experienced in the church when she saw John surrounded by all those people who seemed to take possession of him so absolutely and with such disgusting self-assurance.

Manoeuvering her features into something like a pout, she asked mockingly:

"And since you would not leave your mother's meeting and your jail-bird and your wife-beater for me, is there any time at all when an all-seeing Providence would send you again to the side of a lonely woman?"

The minister smiled at the irony, while scanning once more the pages of his little date-book. "To look in after prayer meeting about nine-thirty on Wednesday night would be my next opportunity, I should say," he reported presently.

"Wednesday!" complained Marien. "It is three eternities away. However," and her voice grew crisp with decision, "Wednesday night it shall be. In the meantime, do you speak anywhere? I shall attend the mother's meeting, if you will tell me where it is. I shall even come to prayer meeting; and," she concluded vivaciously; "you will be borne away by me triumphantly in my new French car, which was sent out here weeks and weeks ago to be tuned up and ready for my coming."

On Wednesday night Miss Dounay made good her word. When the little prayer-meeting audience emerged from the chapel room of All People's, it gazed wonderingly at a huge black shape on wheels that rested at the curb with two giant, fiery eyes staring into the night.

The old sexton, looking down from the open doorway, saw his pastor shut into this luxurious equipage with two strange women, for Marien was properly accompanied by Julie, and nodded his head with emphatic approval.

"Some errand of mercy," he mumbled with fervency. "Brother Hampstead is the most helpful man in the world."

Nor was this the last appearance of Marien Dounay's shining motor-car before the door of All People's. It was seen also in front of the palm-surrounded cottage on the bay front, where John Hampstead lived with his sister, Rose, and the children, and enjoyed, at times, some brief seclusion from his busy, pottering life of general helpfulness.

Once the car even stopped before the home of the Angel of the Chair, perhaps because Hampstead had told Marien casually that of all women Mrs. Burbeck had alone been consistently able to understand him, and the actress wished to learn her secret. But the Angel of the Chair, while quite unabashed by the glamour of the actress-presence, nevertheless refused entirely to be drawn into talk about Brother Hampstead, who was usually the most enthusiastic subject of her conversation. Instead she spent most of the time searching the depths of Miss Dounay's baffling eyes with a look from her own luminous orbs, half-apprehensive and half-appealing, that made the caller exceedingly uncomfortable; so that Marien would have accounted the visit fruitless and even unpleasant, if she had not, while there, chanced to meet the young man known to fortune and the social registers as Rollo Charles Burbeck.

Rollo was the darling son of the Angel and the pride of the Elder's heart. Tall, blond, handsome, and twenty-eight, endowed with his mother's charm of manner and a certain mixture of the coarse practicality and instinct for leadership which his father possessed, the young man had come to look upon himself as a sort of favorite of the fickle goddess for whom nothing could be expected to fall out otherwise than well. Without money and without prestige, in fact, without much real ability, and more because as a figure of a youth he was good to look upon and possessed of smooth amiability, Rollie, as his friends and his doting mother called him, had risen through the lower rounds of the Amalgamated National to be one of its assistant cashiers and a sort of social handy-man to the president, very much in the sense that this astute executive had political handy-men and business handy-men in the capacity of directors, vice-presidents, and even minor official positions in his bank.

But there were, nevertheless, some grains of sand in the bearings of Rollo's spinning chariot wheels.

In his capacity as an Ambassador to the Courts of Society, he had the privilege of leaving the bank quite early in the afternoon, when his presence at some daylight function might give pleasure to a hostess whose wealth or influence made her favor of advantage to the Amalgamated National. He might sometimes place himself and a motor-car at the disposal of a distinguished visitor from outside the city, might dine this visitor and wine him, might roll him far up the Piedmont Heights, and spread before his eye that wonderful picture of commercial and industrial life below, clasped on all sides by the blue breast and the silvery, horn-like arms of the Bay of San Francisco.

All these things, of course, involved expenditures of money as well as time. The bills for such expenditures Rollo might take to the president of the bank, who wrote upon them with his fat hand and a gold pencil, "O.K.—J.M." after which they were paid and charged to a certain account in the bank entitled: "Miscellaneous." This, not unnaturally, got Rollie, in the course of a couple of years, into luxurious habits. After eating a seven-dollar dinner with the financial man of a Chicago firm of bond dealers, it was not the easiest thing in the world to content himself the next day with the fifty-cent luncheon which his own salary permitted. Furthermore, Rollo, because of his standing at the bank and his social gifts, was drawn into clubs, played at golf, or dawdled in launches, yachts, or automobiles with young men of idle mind who were able to toss out money like confetti. It was inevitable that circumstances should arise under which Rollo also had to toss, or look to himself like the contemptible thing called "piker." Consequently, he frequently tossed more than he could afford, and eventually more than he had.

To meet this drain upon resources the debonair youth did not possess, Rollie resorted to undue fattening of his expense accounts, but, when the amounts became too large to be safely concealed by this means from the scrutiny of J.M., he had dangerous recourse to misuse of checks upon a certain trust fund of which he was the custodian. He did this reluctantly, it must be understood, and was always appalled by the increasing size of the deficit he was making. He knew too that some day there must come a reckoning, but against that inevitable day several hopes were cherished.

One was that old J.M., brooding genius of the Amalgamated National, might become appreciative and double Rollie's salary. Yet the heart of J.M. was traditionally so hard that this hope was comparatively feeble. In fact, Rollie would have confessed himself that the lottery ticket which he bought every week, and whereby he stood to win fifteen thousand dollars, was a more solid one. Besides this, hope had other resources. There were, for instance, the "ponies" which part of the year were galloping at Emeryville, only a few miles away, and there were other race tracks throughout the country, and pool rooms conveniently at hand. While Rollie was too timid to lose any great sum at these, nevertheless they proved a constant drain, and the only real asset of his almost daily venturing was the doubtful one of the friendship of "Spider" Welsh, the bookmaker.

Rollie's first test of this friendship was made necessary by the receipt of a letter notifying him that the executors of the estate which included the trust fund he had been looting would call the next day at eleven for a formal examination of the account. Rollie at the moment was more than fifteen hundred dollars short, and getting shorter. That night he went furtively through an alley to the back room of the bookmaker.

"Let me have seventeen hundred, Spider, for three days, and I'll give you my note for two thousand," he whispered nervously.

"What security?" asked the Spider, craft and money-lust swimming in his small, greenish-yellow eye.

"My signature's enough," said Rollie, bluffing weakly.

"Nothin' doin'," quoth the Spider decisively.

Cold sweat broke out on Rollie's brow faster than He could wipe it off.

"I'll make it twenty-five hundred," the young man said hoarsely.

Spider looked interested. He leaned across the table, his darting, peculiar glance shifting searchingly from first one of Rollie's eyes to the other, his form half crouching, his whole body alert, cruelty depicted on his face and suggesting that his nickname was no accident but a sure bit of underworld characterization.

"Make it three thousand, and I'll lay the money in your hand," said the Spider coldly.

Rollie's case was desperate. He drew a blank note from his pocket, filled it, and signed it; then passed it across the table. But with the Spider's seventeen hundred deep in his trousers pockets, the feeling that he had been grossly taken advantage of seemed to demand of Rollie that his manhood should assert itself.

"Spider, you are a thief!" he proclaimed truculently.

"I guess you must be one yourself, or you wouldn't want seventeen hundred in such a hell of a hurry," was Spider's cool rejoinder, as he practically shoved Rollie out of his back door.

Now this retort of Spider's was quite a shock to Rollie; but there are shocks and shocks. Moreover, when the executors upon their scheduled hour came to Rollo Charles Burbeck, trustee, and found his accounts and cash balancing to a cent, which was exactly as they expected to find them, why this in itself was some compensation for taking the back-talk even of a bookmaker.

But the next day Spider Welsh's roll was the fatter by three thousand dollars, and the trust account was short the same amount.

Thereafter, and despite good resolutions, the size of the defalcation began immediately to grow again, although Rollo, if he suffered much anxiety on that account, concealed it admirably. He knew that under the system he was safe for the present, and outwardly he moulted no single feather, but wore his well tailored clothes with the same sleek distinction, and laughed, chatted, and danced his way farther and farther into the good graces of clambering society, partly sustained by the hope that even though lotteries and horse races failed him, and the "Old Man's" heart proved adamant, some rich woman's tender fancy might fasten itself upon him, and a wealthy marriage become the savior of his imperiled fortunes.

It was while still in this state of being, but with that semi-annual turning over of dead papers again only a few weeks distant, Rollo was greatly amazed to blunder into the presence of Marien Dounay in his mother's sun-room at four o'clock one afternoon, when chance had sent him home to don a yachting costume. A little out of touch with things at All People's, the young man's surprise at finding Miss Dounay tête-à-tête with his own mother was the greater by the fact that he knew a score of ambitious matrons who were at the very time pulling every string within their reach to get the actress on exhibition as one of their social possessions.

Because young Burbeck's interest in women was by the nature of his association with them largely mercenary, and just now peculiarly so on account of his own haunting embarrassment, he was rather impervious to the physical charms of Miss Dounay herself. He only saw something brilliant, dazzling, convertible, and exerted himself to impress her favorably, postponing the departure upon his yachting trip dangerously it would seem, had not the two got on so well together that the actress offered to take him in her car to shorten his tardiness at the yacht pier.

After this, acquaintance between the two young people ripened swiftly. Because John Hampstead was so busy, Marien had an abundance of idle time upon her hands. Agitated continually by a cat-like restlessness, seeking a satiety she was unable to find, the actress had no objections to spending a great deal of this idle time upon Rollo. He rode with her in that swift-scudding, smooth-spinning foreign car. She sailed with him upon the bay in a tiny cruising sloop that courtesy dubbed a yacht. More than once she entertained Rollie with one of these delightful Bohemian suppers served in her hotel suite, sometimes with other guests and sometimes flatteringly alone.

Rollie enjoyed all of this, but without succumbing seriously. His spread of canvas was too small, he carried too much of the lead of deep anxiety upon his centerboard to keel far over under the breeze of her stiffest blandishments; but all the while he held her acquaintance as a treasured asset, introducing her to about-the-Bay society with such calculating discrimination as to put under lasting obligations to himself not only Mrs. von Studdeford, his friend and patron, but certain other carefully chosen mistresses of money.

As for Marien, her triumphs were still too recent, her vanity was still too childish, not to extract considerable enjoyment from being Exhibit "A" at the most important social gatherings the community offered; but her complacence was at all times modified by moods and caprices. She would disappoint Rollie's society friends for the most unsubstantial reasons and appeared to think her own whimsical change of purpose an entirely sufficient explanation. Sometimes she did not even bother about an explanation, and her manner was haughty in the extreme.

Her most vexatious trick of the kind was to disappear one night five minutes before she was to have gone with Rollie to be guest of honor at a dinner given by Mrs. Ellsworth Harrington. The hostess raged inconsolably, taking her revenge on Rollie in words and looks which, in her quarter, proclaimed thumbs down for long upon that unfortunate, adventuring youth.

"Take me about nine hundred and ninety-nine years to square myself with that double-chinned queen," muttered Rollie, standing at eleven o'clock of the same night upon the corner opposite the Hotel St. Albans and looking up inquisitively at the suite of Miss Dounay, which was on the floor immediately beneath the roof.

The young man's hat was pushed back so that his forehead seemed almost high and, in addition to its seeming, the brow wore a disconsolate frown.

"Looks as if I'd kind of lost my rabbit's foot," he murmured, relaxing into a vernacular that neither Mrs. Harrington, Mrs. von Studdeford, nor other ladies of their class would have deemed it possible to flow from the irreproachable lips of Rollo Charles Burbeck. Yet his friends should have been very indulgent with Rollie to-night! The world had grown suddenly hard for him. The executors were due again to-morrow; and his deficit had passed four thousand dollars.

So desperate was his plight that for an hour that afternoon Rollie had actually thought of throwing himself upon the mercy of Mrs. Ellsworth Harrington, who had hundreds of thousands in her own right, and who might have saved him with a scratch of the pen. Her heart had been really soft toward Rollie, too, but Marien's caprice to-night had spoiled all chance of that. Nothing remained but the Spider. Rollie had an appointment with him in fifteen minutes.

But in the meantime he indulged a somber, irritated curiosity concerning Miss Dounay. Since staring upward at her windows brought no satisfaction he had recourse to the telephone booth in the hotel lobby, and got the information that Miss Dounay was out but had left word that if Mr. Burbeck called he was to be told he was expected at ten-thirty and there would be other guests.

That meant supper, and a lively little time. No doubt the actress would try to make amends. Well, Rollie would most surely let her. He had no intention of quarreling with an asset, even though occasionally it turned itself into a liability. But it was now past ten-thirty, ten forty-seven, to be exact, and his engagement with the Spider was at eleven. However, since his hostess was still out, and therefore would be late at her own party, his prospective tardiness gave the young man no concern.

But, on leaving the telephone booth and advancing through the wide lobby of the hotel, young Burbeck was surprised to see Miss Dounay's car driven up to the curb. There she was, the beautiful devil! Where could she have been? Yet, since Rollie's curiosity and his wish for an explanation of her conduct were nothing like so great as his desire to avoid meeting her until this business with the Spider was off his mind, he executed an oblique movement in the direction of the side exit; but not until a shoulder-wise glance had revealed to him the stalwart form of the Reverend John Hampstead emerging first from the Dounay limousine.

"The preacher!" he muttered in disgusted tones, "I thought so. She's nuts on him; or he is on her, or something. Say!" and the young man came to an abrupt stop, while his eyes opened widely, and his nostrils sniffed the air as if he scented scandal. "I wonder if she tried the same line of stuff on the parson, and he's falling for it? It certainly would be tough on mother if anything went wrong with her sky pilot."

However, Rollie's own exigencies were too great for him to forget them long, even in contemplating the prospective downfall of a popular idol, and he made his way to his engagement.

Rollie was a long time with Spider. Part of this delay was due to the fact that the Spider was broke. He did not have forty-two hundred dollars, nor any appreciable portion thereof. Another part of the delay was due to the fact that Spider took some time in elaborating a plan to put both Rollie and himself in possession of abundant funds. The plan was grasped upon quickly, but, being a detestable coward, Rollie halted long before undertaking an enterprise that required the display of nerve and daring under circumstances where failure meant instant ruin.

However, there was at least a gambler's chance, while with the executors to-morrow there was no chance. Inevitably, therefore, the young man, white of face, with a lump in his throat and a flutter in his breast, gripped with his cold, nerveless hand the avaricious palm of Spider, and the bargain was made. Even then, however, there was a stage wait while an emissary of the Spider's went on a dive-scouring tour that in twenty minutes turned up a short-haired, scar-nosed shadow of a man who answered to the name of the "Red Lizard", a designation which the fiery hue of his skin and the slimy manner of the creature amply justified.

Once out of Spider's place, Rollie lingered in the alley long enough to screw his scant courage to the place where it would stick for a few hours at least; and at precisely half-past eleven, looking his handsome, debonair self, his open overcoat revealing him still in evening dress, and with his silk hat self-confidently a-tilt, he sauntered nonchalantly through the lobby of the Hotel St. Albans to an elevator which bore him skyward.

The pride of the Elder and the son of the Angel, the social ambassador of the Amalgamated National, was prepared once more to do his duty by his fortune.

CHAPTER XXIII

CAPRICIOUS WOMAN

With more than a month of odd hours invested upon Marien Dounay, the Reverend John Hampstead had reluctantly made up his mind that failure must be written over his efforts in her behalf.

She had never told him the secret want which was making her unhappy. Her manner and her mood varied from flights of ecstasy, bordering on intoxication of spirit, to depths of depression which suggested that the gifted woman was suffering from some sort of mania. She was always eager to see him, always clamoring for more of his time, and yet after the first week or so he never left her presence without being made to feel that her hours with him had been a disappointment.

To tell the truth, he had himself been greatly disappointed in her. She appeared to him altogether frivolous, altogether worldly. He was completely convinced that she had not only toyed with him years ago, but was toying with him now, although of course, in an entirely different way.

For five days he had not seen her, but hating to give up entirely, and finding himself one evening in the vicinity of the Hotel St. Albans, he ventured to run in upon her for a moment. She was decked as if for an evening party in a dress of gold and spangles, as conspicuous for an excess of materials in the train as for an utter absence of them about the arms and shoulders, which, on this occasion, even the blaze of diamonds did not redeem from a look of nakedness to the eyes of the minister,—a mental reaction which any student of psychology will recognize as ample evidence that John Hampstead, man, had passed entirely beyond the power of Marien Dounay, woman.

Miss Dounay received her caller with that low purr of surprise and gladness which was characteristic, and instantly proposed that they go out for a ride on the foothill boulevard, and a dinner at the Three Points Inn.

While the minister had not planned to give her an evening, this was one of the rare occasions when he had leisure time at his disposal, and since he had resolved to make one last effort to help the woman, he decided to accept the invitation.

The evening, however, was not a success. The dinner was good, the roads were smooth, the night air was balmy and full of a thousand perfumes from field and garden; but Miss Dounay's mood, at first merry, sagged lower and lower into a kind of sullen despair, in which she reproached the minister bitterly for his failure to understand her.

François, the chauffeur, had, by command of his mistress, stopped the car on the curve of the hill, at a point where the bright moon made faces as clear as day, and, having climbed down as if to look the car over, they heard his boot heels grow fainter and fainter on the graveled road as he tactfully ambled off out of earshot.

Hampstead was still patient.

"I have been so earnest in my desire to help you," he said, by way of broaching the subject again.

"You cannot help me," Marien snapped. "Something bars you. Your church, your position, all these foolish women who are in love with you, this whole community which has made a 'property' god of you,—they are to blame! They stand between us. They prevent you from seeing what you ought to see. They make you blind. You think you are humble. It is a mock humility. Under its guise you hide a lofty egotism. You think you are a preacher; you are not. You are still an actor, playing your part, and playing it so busily that you have ceased to be genuine. All this sentiment which you display for the suffering and needy and distressed is a worked-up sentiment. It goes with the part you play. It makes you blind, false, hypocritical!"

"Miss Dounay!" exclaimed the minister sharply.

But beside herself with chagrin and disappointment, the woman ran on with growing scorn, as she asked sneeringly: "Do you not see that all this gaping adoration is unreal? That a touch would overthrow you? A single false step, and the newspapers which have made you for the sake of a front-page holiday would have another holiday, and a bigger one, in tearing you down?"

Hampstead gritted his teeth, but he could not have stopped her.

"Can you imagine what would be the biggest news story that could break to-morrow morning in Oakland?" she persisted. "It would be the fall of John Hampstead. Can't you see it?" she laughed derisively. "Headlines a foot tall? Can't you hear the newsboys calling? Can't you see the 'Sisters' whispering? Can't you see the gray heads bobbing? The pulpit of All People's declared vacant! John Hampstead a by-word and worse—a joke! Can't you see it?"

Not unnaturally, the minister was angry.

"No," he said sharply, "and you will never see it, for I shall not take that single false step of which you speak."

"Oh, you really would not need to take it," sneered the actress, with a sinister note in her voice, "a man in your position need not fall. He may only seem to fall."

It seemed to John that the woman was actually menacing him.

"François!" he called sharply.

The chauffeur's heels came clicking back from around the turn, and in a silence, which upon Miss Dounay's part might be described as fuming, and upon the minister's as aggressively dignified, the couple were driven back to the hotel, arriving in time for Rollie Burbeck to emerge from the telephone booth, to observe the car, and to avoid its occupants.

With almost an elaboration of scrupulous courtesy, the minister helped Miss Dounay from the automobile, walked with her to the elevator, and ascended to the doorway of her apartment, where, extending his hand, he said sadly, in tones of finality, but without a trace of any other feeling than regretful sympathy: "I still desire to befriend you as I may. But I shall not be able to come to you again."

To his surprise, Marien answered him with something like a threat!

"It is I," she rejoined quickly, "who will come to you. I do not know how it is to happen yet, but I will come, and when I do—if I am not much mistaken—you will be happier to receive my call than you ever were to receive one in all your life before!"

Again there was menace in her tone, and never had she looked more imperiously regal than as she stood holding the loop of her train in the left hand, the right upon the knob of the door, the shimmering evening cloak pushed back to reveal her gold and spangled figure, standing arrow straight, while the dark eyes shot defiance.

Neither had she ever been guilty of a more studied or effective bit of theatricalism than when, immediately following this insinuating speech, the actress noiselessly propelled the door inward, revealing the presence of a group of men in evening dress posed about the room in various attitudes of boredom. As the door swung, these men turned expectantly and with quick eyes photographed the picture of the minister in the hall, his sober, perplexed gaze set upon the figure of the beautiful woman, whose features had instantly changed as she made her entrance upon an entirely different drama.

"Ah, my neglected guests!" exclaimed the actress in tones of mild self-reproach. "You will forgive my not being here to receive you, when you know the reason. Doctor Hampstead has been showing me some of the more interesting and unusual phases of that eccentric parish work of his, over which you Oaklanders rave so much. And now, the dear good man was hesitating in the hall at intruding upon our little party. I have insisted that he shall be one of us. Am I not right, gentlemen?"

Several of Miss Dounay's guests were well known to Hampstead personally, and the readiness with which they dragged him within attested to the clergyman's wide popularity among quite different sorts of very much worth-while persons, for, as a matter of fact, Miss Dounay's guests were rather representative. The group included an editor, an associate justice of the Supreme Court, a prominent merchant, a capitalist or two, and other persons, either of achievement or position, to the number of some eight or ten.

Their presence witnessed not only that Miss Dounay, in her liking for a virile type of man, had made quick and careful selection from those she had met during her short stay in the city, but also testified to the readiness with which this type responded to the Dounay personality.

That no other woman was present, and that the actress should assume the entire responsibility of entertaining so many gentlemen at one time, was entirely in keeping with her particular kind of vanity and the situations it was bound to create.

Standing in the center of the room, wearing that expression of happy radiance which admiration invariably brought to her face, her bare shoulders gleaming, her jewels blazing, she rotated upon her heel till her train wound up in a swirling eddy at her feet, out of which she bloomed like some voluptuous flower, while a chorus of "Oh's" and "Ah's" of laughing adulation followed the revolution of her eyes about the circuit; for the guests knew that to their hostess this little gathering was a play, and their part was to enact a vigorously approving audience.

"Gentlemen," she proposed, "you are all in evening dress; but I,"—and she shrugged her bewitching shoulders naïvely,—"I have been in this gown for ages—until I hate it. Will you indulge me a little longer?" And she inclined her head in the direction of the red portières through which she had gone that first night to don the diamonds for Hampstead.

Of course the gentlemen excused her, and Miss Dounay achieved another startling theatricalism by reappearing in an astonishingly short time, offering the most surprising contrast to her former self. The yellow and spangles were gone. In their place was the simplest possible gown of soft black velvet, with only a narrow band passing over the shoulders and framing a bust like marble for its whiteness against the black. The dress was entirely without ornament, presenting a supreme achievement of the art of the modiste, in that it appeared not so much to be a gown as a bolt of velvet, suddenly caught up and draped to screen her figure chastely but beautifully, at the same time it revealed and even emphasized those swelling curves and long lines which lost themselves elusively in the baffling pliancy of her remarkable figure. The hair was worn low upon the neck, and the jewels which had blazed in her coiffure like a dazzling crown were no longer in evidence. With them had gone the pendants from her ears, and that coruscating circlet of diamonds from the neck, which was her chief pride and most valuable single possession. There was not even a band of gold upon her arms, nor a ring upon her tapering finger. Hence what the admiring circle seemed to see was not something brilliant because bedizened, but a creature exquisite because genuine, a beauty depending for its power solely upon nature's comeliness.

No woman with less beauty or less art, desiring to be admired as Marien Dounay passionately did, could have dared this contrast successfully. No one who knew men less thoroughly than she would have understood that for a purely professional artist to attain this look of a simple womanly woman was the greatest possible triumph, stirring every instinct of admiration and of chivalry.

And whatever was at the back of the trick Miss Dounay had played—and there was generally something back of her caprices—in thrusting John Hampstead, with whom she had practically quarreled, into this group of guests, she appeared to forget him entirely in the succession of whims, moods, and graces with which she proceeded to their entertainment.

For one thing, she admitted them to the large room which served as her boudoir, into which they had seen her go in gold and spangles to emerge like a miracle in demure black velvet.

Of course, there was an excuse for thus titillating the curiosity of vigorous men with that lure of mysterious enchantment which lurks in the boudoir of a lovely woman, and the excuse was that the room, while half-boudoir, was also half-studio, and held tables on which were displayed the models of the stage sets and the costumer's designs for Miss Dounay's coming London production.

As the actress had divined, the inspection of these fascinating details of stagecraft interested her guests as much as the display of them delighted her.

In the hour which ensued before the supper, a collation that in its variety and substance again proved how well the actress comprehended the appetite of the male, two or three guests arrived tardily. The earliest of these to enter was Rollo Charles Burbeck, who came in ample time to roam about the room of mystery at will with the remainder of the guests. Indeed, he stayed in it so much that its enchantment for him might have been presumed to be greater than for the others.

Before the supper, too, one of the guests craved the liberty of departing. This was the Reverend John Hampstead. The farewell of his hostess was gracious and without the slightest reminiscence of anything unpleasant, but he was prevented from more than mentally congratulating himself upon the change in her manner toward him by the fact that in walking some ten feet from where he touched the fingers of his hostess to where a butler-sort of person, borrowed from the hotel staff, stood waiting with his overcoat, Doctor Hampstead came face to face with Rollie Burbeck, who was just emerging from the boudoir-studio with a disturbed look upon his usually placid face, as if, for instance, he had seen a ghost.

In consequence, the minister moved down the corridor to the elevator, not pondering upon his own perplexities, but thinking to himself, "I wonder now if that young man is in any serious trouble. It would break his mother's heart—it would kill her if he were."

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE DAY OF ALL DAYS

Next morning Doctor Hampstead was up bright and early, clad in his long study gown and walking, according to custom, beneath his palm trees, while he reflected on the duties of the day before him. This was really the day of all days for him, but he did not know it.

An unpleasant thought of Marien Dounay came impertinently into mind, but he repressed it. He had failed with her. A pity! Yes; but his work was too big, too, important, for him to permit it to be interfered with longer by any individual.

Besides, there were with him this morning thoughts of a totally different woman, whose life was as fresh and beautiful as the dew-kissed flowers about him. Five years of unswerving devotion on his part had all but wiped from her memory the admission of her lover which had so hurt the trusting heart of Bessie. That confiding trust, the loss of which her pen had so eloquently lamented, had grown again. The very day was set. In four months John Hampstead would hold Bessie Mitchell in his arms, and this time it seemed to him, more surely than it had that day in the little summer house by the tiny painted park in Los Angeles, that he would never, never let her out of them.

In the midst of these reflections, a thud sounded on the graveled walk at the minister's feet. It was the morning paper tightly rolled and whirled from the unerring hand of a boy upon a flying bicycle. The minister waved his hand in response to a similar salute from the grinning urchin, then turned and looked at the roll of ink and paper speculatively. That paper was the world coming to sit down at breakfast with him, and tell him what it had been doing in the past twenty-four hours. It had been doing some desperate things. The wide strip of mourning at the end of the bent cylinder, indicating tall headlines, showed this. The paper had come to him to make confession of the world's sins. This was right, for he was one of the world's confessors.

But with this thought came another which had occurred to him before. This was that he had won his confessor's gaberdine too cheaply. He had gained his position as a deputy saviour of mankind at too small a cost. Sometimes he questioned if he were not yet to be made to suffer—excruciatingly—supremely—if, for instance, Bessie were not to be taken from him. Yet he knew, as he reflected somewhat morbidly to this effect, that such a suffering would hardly be efficient. It must be something within himself, something volitional, a cup which he might drink or refuse to drink. The world's saviour was not Simon of Cyrene, whom they compelled to bear the cross, but the man from the north, who took up his own cross. True, Hampstead had thought on several occasions that he was taking up a cross, but it proved light each time, and turned into a crown either of public or of private approbation. Yet the cross was there, if he had only known it, in the tall black headlines on the paper rolled up and bent tightly and lying like a bomb at his feet.

However, instead of picking up the paper, he strolled out upon the sidewalk and down for a turn upon the sea-wall. The lately risen sun shot a ray across the eastern hills, and the dancing waters played elfishly with its beams, as if they had been ten thousand tiny mirrors. A fresh breeze was blowing, and as the minister filled his lungs again and again with the wave-washed air, it seemed as if a great access of strength were flowing into his veins. It flowed in and in until he felt himself stronger than he had ever been before in his life.

With this feeling of strength, which was spiritual as well as physical, came the desire to test it against something big, bigger than he had ever faced before. All unconscious how weak his puny strength would be against its demands, he lifted his arms towards the sky like a sun-worshiper and prayed that the day before him might be a great day.

Then leaving the sea-wall, the minister walked with swinging, quite un-gownly strides up the sidewalk and turned in between the green patches of lawn before his own door, picking up the paper and unrolling it as he mounted the porch. On the step before the top one he paused. The black headline was before his eye.

"DOUNAY DIAMONDS STOLEN" was its screaming message.

The minister was quickly gutting the column of its meaning, when a step upon the graveled walk behind startled him into turning suddenly toward the street, where between the polished red trunks of the palms and under their spreading leaves which met overhead, he saw framed the figure of Rollie Burbeck, halting uncertainly, with pale, excited face. This expression, indeed, was a mere exaggeration of the very look Doctor Hampstead had last seen upon it; but he did not immediately connect the two.

"Your mother!" exclaimed the clergyman apprehensively, for that precious life, always hanging by a thread which any sudden shock might snap, was a constant source of anxiety to those who loved the Angel of the Chair. "Something has happened to her?"

"No! To me!" groaned the young man hoarsely, hurrying forward as the minister stepped down to meet him.

"Something awful! Can I see you absolutely alone?"

"Why, certainly, Rollie," replied the minister with ready sympathy. "Come this way."

Hastily the minister led his caller around the side of the wide, low-lying cottage to the outside entrance of his study.

"Is that door locked?" asked Rollie, as, once inside the room, he darted a frightened glance at the doorway connecting with the rest of the house.

Although knowing himself to be safe from interruption, the minister tactfully walked over and turned the key. He then locked the outer door as well, lowered the long shade at the wide side window, and snapped on the electric light.

"No eye and no ear can see or hear us now, save one," he said with sympathetic gravity. "Sit down."

Rollie sat on the very edge of the Morris chair, his elbows on the ends of its arms, while his head hung forward with an expression of ghastliness upon the weakly handsome features.

"You saw the paper?" he began.

The minister nodded.

"Here they are!" the young man gulped, the words breaking out of him abruptly. At the same time there was a quick motion of his hand, and a rainbow flash from his coat pocket to the blotter upon the desk, where the circlet of diamonds coiled like a blazing serpent that appeared to sway and writhe as each stone trembled from the force with which Burbeck had rid himself of the hateful touch. The minister started back with shock and a sudden sense of recollection.

"Oh, Rollie," he groaned, and then asked, as if not quite able to believe his eyes: "You took them?"

"I—I stole them," the excited man half-whispered.

"Why?" questioned Hampstead, still wrestling with his astonishment.

"Because I am short in my accounts," Rollie shuddered, passing a despairing hand across his eyes. "I have to have money to-day, or I am ruined."

"But you could not turn these into money. You must have been beside yourself."

"No!" replied the excited man, with husky, explosive utterance; "the scheme was all right. Spider Welsh was going to handle 'em for me. We were to split four ways. But the Red Lizard fell down."

"The Red Lizard?" interrupted the minister; for he knew the man who bore the suggestive title.

"Yes. He was to hang a rope down from the cornice on the roof of the hotel, opposite her window, so it would look like an outside job, and he didn't do it. I got the diamonds easy enough—easier than I expected—you know how that was, with all those people coming and going in that room. But I went to bed and couldn't sleep for thinking about the rope. I got up before daylight and went down to see if it was there. So help me God, there's no rope swinging. That makes it an inside job; it puts it up to the guests. By a process of elimination, they'll come down to me. I am ruined any way you look at it, and the shock will kill mother!"

The minister studied the face of his caller critically. Did he love his mother enough to greatly care on her account, or was this merely an afterthought?

"What am I going to do?" the shaken Rollie gasped hoarsely, his eyes fixing themselves in helpless appeal upon the clergyman.

"The thing to do is clear," announced the minister bluntly. "Take these diamonds straight back to Miss Dounay. Tell her you stole them. Throw yourself on her mercy."

A sickly smile curled upon the young man's lip.

"Her mercy?" he repeated. "Do you think that woman has any mercy in her? She has got the worst disposition God ever gave a woman. She would tear me to pieces."

The young fellow again lifted a hand before his eyes, shuddering and reeling as though he might faint.

With a feeling almost of contempt, Hampstead gripped him by the shoulder and shook him sternly.

"Your situation calls for the exercise of some manhood—if you have it," he said sharply. "Tell me. Why did you come here?"

"To get you to help me out!" the broken man murmured helplessly, twisting his hat in his hands. "That was all. I won't lie to you. You've never turned anybody down. Don't turn me down!"

"It was on your mother's account?"

"No, I'm not as unselfish as that. It's just myself. I don't know what's the matter with me. I've lost my nerve. I had it all right enough when I took 'em, except for just a minute after; that's when I met you going away, and with that damned uncanny way of yours you dropped on that something was wrong. But I had my nerve all right; I had it till I got out there on the street this morning and that rope wasn't swinging there over the cornice. Damn the Red Lizard! All I ask is to get out of this, and then to get him by the throat!"

Surely the man had recovered a portion of his nerve, for at the thought of the failure of his partner in crime, his face was suffused with rage, and his weak, writhing hands became twisting talons that groped for the throat of an imaginary Red Lizard.

At sight of this demonstration, Hampstead leaned back in his chair, with the air of one whose interest is merely pathological, observing the phenomena of a soul in the throes of incurable illness. His face was not even sympathetic.

"You have come to the wrong place," he said briefly.

"You won't help me out?"

"Not in your state of mind—which is a mere cowardice in defeat—mere rage at the failure of an accomplice. I should be accessory after the crime."

"Not even to save my mother?" whined the wilted man.

"I should be doing your mother no kindness to confirm her son in crime."

Young Burbeck sat silent and baffled, yet somehow shocked into vigorous thought by the notion that he had encountered something hard, a man with a substratum of moral principle that was like immovable rock.

For a moment the culprit's eyes wandered helplessly about the room and then returned to the rugged face of the minister, with so much of gentleness and so much of strength upon it. Looking at the man thus, Rollie had a sudden, envious wish for his power. This man had a strength of character that was enormous and Gibraltar-like.

"You can help me if you will!" he broke out wretchedly, straining and twisting his neck like a man battling with suffocation.

"Yes," said the minister quietly, his eyes searching to the fellow's very soul, "I can—if you will let me."

"Let you?" and a hysterical smile framed itself on the young man's face. "My God, I will do anything."

"It's something you must be, rather than do," explained the physician to sick souls, once more deeply sympathetic, and leaning forward, he continued significantly: "I want to help you, not for your mother's sake, nor your father's, but for your own whenever you are ready to receive help upon proper terms. You have come here seeking a way out. There is no way out, but there is a way up!"

The cowering man shook his head hopelessly. He had not courage enough even to survey a moral height.

For a moment the minister studied his visitor thoughtfully, wondering what could make him see his guilt as he ought to see it; then abruptly he drew close and began to talk in a low, confidential tone. Almost before the surprised Rollie could understand what was taking place, the Reverend John Hampstead, to whom he had come to confess, was confessing to him; this man, whom he had thought so strong, was telling the story of a young girl's love for him; of his weak infatuation for another woman, of the heart-aches that half-unconscious breach of trust had occasioned him, and worst of all, the pangs it had cost the innocent girl who loved him and believed in his integrity with all her impressionable heart.

There was a moisture in the minister's eye as he concluded his story, and there was a fresh mist in Rollie's as he listened.

But the clergyman passed on immediately from this to tell modestly how, when the death of Langham had imposed the lives of Dick and Tayna on him like a trust, he had been true to it, although at the cost of his great ambition; but that afterward this surrender had brought him all the happiness of his present life as pastor of All People's, while the hope of winning that first love back had been given to him again.

"And so," Hampstead concluded, "to be disloyal to a trust has come to seem to me the worst of all crimes; while to be true to one's obligations appears to me as the highest virtue. In fact, the whole active part of my creed could be summed up pretty well in this little idea of trust.

"Trust is almost the highest thing in life. It is the cement of civilization. Trust is the very foundation of banking. You believe in banking, don't you? In the principle? The idea that hundreds of people trust some banker with their surplus funds, and he puts those funds at the service of the community as a whole through loaning them to persons who redeposit them, to be reloaned and redeposited again, so that the bank, a bundle of individual trusts of rich and poor, becomes one of the fulcrums upon which civilization turns?"

Burbeck listened rather dazed. "I never thought of the principle," he faltered after a minute, "I thought of it as a job."

"Well, you see the point, don't you? It's rather a high calling to be a banker. Now in this case the dead man whose fund you have looted trusted the bank; the bank has trusted you, and you have stolen from the bank. Miss Dounay has trusted you, and you have stolen her diamonds. You see at what I am getting?"

Hampstead paused and glanced penetratingly into the face of Rollie, who had been a little swept out of himself, as much in wonder at the new insight into the life of the minister as at the convincing clarity of the lesson conveyed.

"Yes," he replied thoughtfully and with an air of conviction, "that I am not to think of myself as merely a thief, but as something worse,—as a traitor to many sacred trusts."

"Exactly," exclaimed the minister with satisfaction at the sign of moral perception growing. "To shield a thief from exposure is possibly criminal. To help a man repair the breaches of his trust, to put him in the way of never breaking another trust as long as he lives, that is the true work of the ministry. If it is for that you want help, Rollie, you have come to the right place."

"I did not come for that," admitted the young fellow, strangely able to view himself objectively as a sadly dispiriting spectacle. "I came, as you said, in cowardice, because I didn't know which way to turn, desiring only to find a way out. Somehow, I felt myself a victim. You make me see myself a crook. I came here feeling sorry for myself. You make me hate myself. You make me want to be worthy of trust. You give me hope. I have a feeling I never had before, that I am not much of a man, that I am not equal to a man's job. But tell me what I must do to repair the breaches in my trust, and let me see if I think I can do them."

Burbeck's manner had become calmer, and something of the grayness of despair had left his face, but now at the recurrence of all his perplexities, he presented again the picture of a man cowering beneath a mountain that threatened to fall upon him.

"First of all, you must go back to Miss Dounay with her diamonds," prescribed the minister seriously. "If you have not manhood enough to face her with your confession, I do not see the slightest hope for your character's rehabilitation."

"But the executors!" exclaimed Rollie, with the sense of danger still greater than his sense of guilt. "They will be checking me up at eleven. I've got to cover the shortage, or I'm lost. J.M. would be more terrible than Miss Dounay. It would not be vengeance with him. He'd send me to San Quentin, entirely without feeling, just as a matter of cold duty. He'd shake hands and tell me to look in when I got out. That's J.M."

"Yes, I think it is," said the minister, pausing for a moment of thought. His body was balanced and rocking gently in the swivel chair, his hands were held before him, the tips of the thumb and fingers of the right hand just touching the tips of the thumb and fingers of the left hand and making a rudely elliptical basket into which he was looking as if for inspiration.

Rollie, waiting,—hoping, without knowing what to hope,—had begun to study Hampstead's face with a respectful interest he had never felt before. He noticed the dark shadows beneath the gray eyes, and that lines were beginning to seam the brow, while just now the broad shoulders had a bent look. For the first time it occurred to him that Hampstead's work might be hard work, and he began to feel a kind of reverence for a man who would work so hard for other people, and to reflect that it was noble thus to expend one's energies,—noble to be true to trusts of any sort. It was admirable. It was worthy of emulation. A sudden envy of Hampstead's character seized him, and he began, in the midst of his own distress, to think how one proceeded to get such a character. By the simple process of being true to trusts, the minister had suggested. But this seemed rather hopeless for Rollie. His chance had gone—unless! His mind halted and fastened its hope desperately to this grave, silent, meditative face.

The minister was considering very delicate questions: trying to decide how much weight the slender moral backbone of this softling could carry, asking whether by leaning upon the side of mercy, by taking some very serious responsibility upon himself, he might not shelter him from the consequences of his crime while a new character was grown.

But such questions are not definitely answerable in advance, and it was neither Hampstead's usual magnanimity nor his leaning toward mercy, but his moral enthusiasm for the rehabilitation of lost character that impelled him to take a chance in his decision.

"When do you say they will be upon your books?" he asked abruptly.

"Before twelve, sure; by eleven, probably," was Rollie's quick, nervous answer.

"And how much is your defalcation?"

"Forty-two hundred," sighed Rollie.

"The expedient is almost doubtful," announced the minister solemnly, and with evident reluctance; "and I do not say that the time will not come—when you are stronger, perhaps—when you must tell Mr. Manton that you were once a defaulter; but that bridge we will not cross this morning, and in the meantime, I will let you have the money to cover your shortage."

"Brother Hampstead!" gulped Rollie, reaching out both hands, while his soul leaped in gratitude. It was also the first time he had ever called Hampstead "Brother" except in derision.

The minister waved away this demonstration with a gesture of self-deprecation, and a smile that was almost as sweet as a woman's lighted up his face, while he took from a drawer of his desk a small, flat key, familiar to Rollie because he had seen it before, and many others resembling it.

"Here," said Hampstead, "is the key to my safe deposit box in the Amalgamated National vault. In that box is eleven hundred dollars. It is not my money, but was provided by a friend for use in a contingency which has not arisen. I feel at perfect liberty to use it for this emergency. As you will remember, there is already on file with the vault-room custodian my signed authorization for you to visit the box, because you have served as my messenger before. You will be able, therefore, to gain unquestioned access to it the minute the vaults are open, which as you know is nine o'clock. Take the envelope marked 'Wadham currency.' In the meantime I will go to a friend or two, and within thirty minutes after the bank's doors open, I will bring you another envelope containing thirty-one hundred dollars."

Rollie listened as a condemned man upon a scaffold listens to the reading of his reprieve.

"How can I thank you?" he croaked finally, clutching at the minister's hand.

"You don't thank me," adjured Hampstead, towering and strong, while he gripped the pulseless palm of Burbeck. "Don't thank me! Do your part; that's all."

Rollie clung to the strong hand uncertainly for a few seconds until he himself felt stronger, when his face seemed to lighten somewhat.

"You have a wonderful way with you, Doctor Hampstead," he exclaimed. "You have put conscience into me this morning—and courage."

"Both are important," smiled the minister.

At this moment, Rollie, who was beginning to recover his presence of mind, did one of those innocent things which thereafter played so important a part in the tragical chain of complications which followed from this interview. The act itself was no more than to select from a small tray of rubber bands upon the study desk, the only red one which happened to be there, and to snap it with several twists about the neck of the vault-box key, remarking as he did so: