HELD TO ANSWER (continued 6)

"For ready identification. There are sometimes several of these keys in my possession at once."

The minister nodded approvingly. "I suppose," he commented, "other people make use of you as a messenger to their boxes."

"Half a dozen of the women have that habit," the young man observed.

"Trusted!" exclaimed the minister impulsively, laying a cordial hand upon the young man's shoulder. "You have been greatly trusted. It is a rare privilege, isn't it?"

Rollie nodded thoughtfully.

"And these?" questioned Doctor Hampstead, motioning to where the diamond necklace curled, appearing to Rollie less like a serpent now and more like a strangler's knot.

"I'm afraid of them," said the young man with a shudder. "Couldn't—couldn't you take them back to her and tell the story?"

The clergyman shook his head solemnly.

"I cannot confess your sins for you," he averred. "If you are not man enough for that, we might as well stop before we begin."

Hampstead's tone was final.

"You are right," admitted Burbeck, in tones of conviction; "you are right."

But still he could not bring himself to touch the diamonds, and stood gazing as if charmed by the evil spell they wrought. Sensing this, the minister took up from his desk a long envelope which bore his name and address in the corner, opened it, lifted the sparkling string by one end, dropped it inside, moistened the flap, sealed it, and handed it to Burbeck.

"There," he exclaimed, "you don't even have to touch them again. Go straight to her hotel."

"Oh, but I cannot," exclaimed Rollie, apprehension trembling in his tones. "I shall not dare to leave the bank until the shortage is covered. The executors might come in ahead of time, and I must be there to stall them off, if necessary. But I might telephone to Miss Dounay."

"Telephones are leaky instruments," objected Hampstead, with a shake of his head.

"Or send her a note," suggested Burbeck.

"Notes miscarry," controverted the minister sagaciously, "and they do not always die when their mission is accomplished. Since you are taking my advice, I would say summon all your self-control, contain your secret in patience during the hours you must wait until your shortage is made good, and you can leave the bank to see Miss Dounay in person. You must do your part entirely alone, for my lips are sealed."

"Sealed?" questioned Rollie, not quite comprehending.

"Yes, the secret is your own. Think of your confession as made to God!"

"You mean that you would never tell on me, no matter what happened?"

"Just that. The liberty is not mine. I can only expect you to be true to your trust as I am true as a minister to mine."

This was an idea Rollie could not grasp readily. It was taking away a prop upon which he had meant to lean.

"But," he argued, "you make it possible for me to take your money and that of your friends and keep it, if you don't have some kind of a club over me."

"Exactly," replied the minister. "I want no club over you, Rollie. You must be a free agent, or else I have not really trusted you. Your right action would mean nothing if compulsory. You must be true to your trust from some inner spiritual motive."

But Rollie was still groping. "And if I should, for instance, steal the money you give me?"

"You would know it, and I, and one other," replied the minister, raising his eyes devoutly.

Rollie swept his hand across his face slowly, with a gesture of bewilderment. This minister was taking him to higher and higher ground. He began to feel as if he had been led up to some transfiguring mountain peak of moral eminence.

"It is the highest appeal which could be made to the honor of another," he breathed in tones approaching awe.

"Exactly," declared Hampstead again with that air of finality, "and if I should fail to be true to my part of the trust, what has passed between us this morning has been the mere compounding of a felony and not the act of a priest of God looking to the regeneration of a soul."

In a wordless interval, Rollie Burbeck pressed the minister's hand once more and departed, his face still wearing a veiled expression as if he had not quite caught the import of all that had been said.

But neither, for that matter, had the minister; although he was never surer of himself than now, when he ushered his guest out of the side door with a cheery, courage-giving smile, and hastened in to his greatly delayed breakfast.

With a thoughtful air and a feeling of intense satisfaction in his breast, he unfolded his napkin, broke his egg, and sipped his coffee, still with no suspicion that this was the day of all days for him, or that he had just sawed and hammered the cross which might make his title clear to saviourhood.

CHAPTER XXV

HIS BRIGHT IDEA

Young Burbeck's desk at the Amalgamated National was in an open space behind a marble counter. About him in the same open space were desks of two other assistant cashiers. Back of these were the private offices of the cashier, the president and the vice-president, as well as one or two reception rooms. Beyond the marble counter was a broad public aisle, on the farther side of which the tellers and bookkeepers worked, screened by the usual wire and glass. The safe deposit vaults were in the basement and reached by a stairway from the open lobby on the first floor.

Hurrying from the minister's house, Burbeck reached his desk at ten minutes before the hour of nine. This left him ten minutes of waiting before he could get the eleven hundred dollars of the Wadham currency; and waiting was the very hardest thing he could do under the circumstances. He was the first of the assistant cashiers to arrive, but the cashier, Parma, heavy-jowled, with dark wall eyes, was visible through the open door of his office, checking over some of the auditor's sheets with a gold pencil in his pudgy hand. His thick shoulders and broad, unresponsive back somehow threw a chill of apprehension into Rollie. What brought that old owl down here at this time of the morning, he wondered.

The colored porter, resplendent in his uniform of gray and brass, advanced with obsequious courtesy and proffered a copy of the morning paper. Rollie snatched at it with a sense of relief, but the relief was only momentary. There was the hateful headline again. It had been hours, days, weeks since he saw that headline first, while standing on the street and looking up for the rope that was to be swinging over the cornice of the Hotel St. Albans. Couldn't they get something else for a headline? Why, of course not. The paper had been on the street but three hours. That headline must hold sway till the noon edition. Besides, it was a good headline.

Rollie grasped the paper firmly with both hands, threw his head back, and pretended to read; but he was not reading. He was looking to see if his hands trembled. Unmistakably they did. They trembled so the paper rattled as if it were having a chill. But pshaw! There was really little to read anyway, beyond the headline. The news had come in too late to make a story for the morning papers. It only said that Miss Dounay had been entertaining some friends and on retiring at half-past two had chanced to notice that her diamond necklace was missing. A search failed to reveal it in the apartment. She at once notified the police. That was all. No word as to who was present, who was suspected, whether a guest, or a servant, or a burglar, or whether any clue had been discovered. There had been no time for that. That would be the story for the afternoon papers. They would find out all about Miss Dounay's movements the night before, and all about her party, and who was present. They would interview each guest, and get a statement from him. They would be sure to interview John Hampstead. Rollie had a sudden feeling of security as he thought of their investigating Hampstead. It was amazing what a rocklike confidence a man could feel in Hampstead.

But they would also interview him—Rollie Burbeck. Because he was so readily accessible, they would interview him first. What would he tell them? How would he bear himself? Would his voice tremble when he tried to talk, as now his hands trembled when he tried to hold the newspaper?

At this very moment the diamonds were in his inside coat pocket. Could he receive the reporters with his usual urbanity, sit smiling nonchalantly, and recite the incidents of the evening, suggest theories and clues, express his righteous indignation at the crime,—all with that envelope and its contents rustling under every movement of his arm? Could he?

To the young man's tortured imagination, the necklace became again a serpent. He could feel it crawling there over his heart, could hear it hissing and rattling as if about to strike. Then it ceased to be a serpent, and was a nest of birds. He knew that every time a reporter asked a question, one of those birds would stretch its wings and call "Cuckoo."

There! It said "Cuckoo" just then. Was the bank haunted? Rollie looked up frightened. Cold sweat was on his brow. Not his hands alone but his whole body trembled. He was really in a very bad way. Could a man have delirium tremens, just from fright? Rollie didn't know, but if a reporter came in just then, he was sure that he would take out the diamonds and hurl them at the news gatherer.

Speaking of delirium tremens, he wished he had a good stiff highball. He must slip out presently long enough to get one. Worse than reporters would be coming round, too. Detectives would come. Chief of detectives Benson might come in person. Rollie disliked Benson and mistrusted him. Benson went on the theory that it takes a crook to catch a crook! When it came to inducing a crook to talk, he was a very handy man with a club. Benson would at once scour the pool rooms and hop joints. Suppose he got the Red Lizard in the dragnet. Suppose he hit the Red Lizard a clip or two with that small, ugly billy that was generally in Benson's pocket when he went to the sweat room; or suppose he kept Red's 'hop' away from him for a few hours? Or suppose Benson happened to know in that uncanny way of his that he, Rollie, had done business with Spider Welsh? He might just walk into the bank and search Rollie on suspicion. And Rollie would have to submit, would have to seem to invite him, almost. His teeth were chattering at the thought.

Discovery—disgrace—conviction—ruin—that was the sequence of the ideas. Stripes! Ugh! Just when the way out, "the way up," was opening to him, too. Discovery, now that a moral hope was gleaming, would be infinitely more terrible than an hour ago, when he was only a rat burrowing from a terrier.

He tried to shake himself together. He must brace up and play the game with a cool head, or he could not play it at all. One thing was clear. The diamonds must be got out of his possession temporarily. But where should he put them? In his desk? Anywhere about the bank? Benson would find them if he started a search, and if Benson didn't search, some one in the bank might stumble upon them accidentally, and then the cat would be out of the bag for fair.

There was a police whistle now! The agitated young man looked about, startled, and then laughed at himself. It was not a police whistle at all. It was the first clear, bell-like note of the bank clock, beginning the stroke of nine.

With a sensation of relief that for a few minutes waiting was over and there was occupation for mind and body, Rollie took the minister's key and strolled in the most casual manner he could command down to the vault room.

"Doctor Hampstead's box," he announced, exhibiting his key. The vault clerk turned to his card index as a mere matter of form, for he remembered well enough Rollie's authorization, and read upon the card of the Reverend John Hampstead his signed permission for Rollo Charles Burbeck to do with his box "as I might or could do if personally present." The clerk stepped inside the vault, scanned the numbers and tiers, and thrust his master-key into the proper lock. Rollie slipped the minister's key into its own place, turned it, and the door flew open. The vault clerk returned to his stand outside the door. Rollie took the box and walked into one of the private rooms provided for the safe deposit patrons. In a moment he was ripping open the envelope marked "Wadham Currency", which he found exactly as the minister had described it.

At sight and feeling of the money in his fingers, a great wave of hope surged over Rollie. It was a solid assurance of escape. With this assurance, there came to the young man a sharp, definite impulse to begin at once the work of character building. As an initial step, he wrote upon one of his personal cards: "I.O.U. $1,100," and signed it, not with his initials, but boldly in vigorous chirography, to express the stoutness of his purpose, with the whole of his name, "Rollo Charles Burbeck." When putting this card carefully back in the envelope from which he had extracted the currency, and placing the envelope on the top of the papers in the box, the young man experienced a fine glow of satisfaction. He had done a good and honorable act in this bold assumption of his debt and in thus leaving the written record there behind him.

But when Rollie took up the currency from the table and slipped the long, thin package into his inside pocket, his fingers came in contact with that other envelope, the presence of which, under the strain of what he must go through this morning, threatened to break down his nerve completely.

With the preacher's box lying there open before him, came a sudden inspiration. What safer place for the Dounay jewels than in it? Doctor Hampstead's character put him absolutely above suspicion. He was the one guest at the supper before whose door no process of elimination would ever halt to point the finger of suspicion. His box, at the moment, was the safest place in the world for the Dounay diamonds.

Rollie was all alone in the closed room. No glance could possibly rest on him; yet, as furtively as if a thousand eyes were peering, he slipped the envelope containing the diamonds from his pocket into the box and heaved a sigh of relief when he saw the lid cover the package from his sight. Returning to the vault room, he locked the box in its chamber and went upstairs to his desk in quite his usual debonair manner.

With a new feeling of confidence which made him bold and precise in all his movements, Rollie laid the safe deposit key, with its innocent little red rubber band about it, exactly in the center of the blotter upon his desk, where it might be every moment under his eye. Then, in the most casual way in the world, he pinned a penciled note to the stack of bills representing the "Wadham currency" and sent it by one of the bank messengers across the wide aisle to a receiving teller's cage. When it arrived, the gap in his financial fences had narrowed to thirty-one hundred dollars. This lessening of the breach increased his self-control and strengthened his resolution. He had only to wait now until the minister appeared with the additional currency, and then at the first opportunity he would slip down to the vault, get the diamonds, and go straight to Miss Dounay.

And in the meantime his premonition that reporters would lean heavily upon him for information about the actress's supper party proved correct. When he talked to these reporters, Rollie noticed that it gave him a fresh sense of security to let his eye turn occasionally to where the little flat key with the red band about it lay upon his desk, lay, and almost laughed. It was really such a good joke to think where the diamonds were.

What made this joke better was that each reporter shrewdly inquired whether Rollie thought the diamonds had actually been stolen, or whether this might not be the familiar device of dramatic press agents. Begging in each instance that he be not quoted, Rollie admitted that of course the whole affair might be no more than the latter.

Yet after the reporters had gone, Rollie wished he had not done this. It was clever, but it was not just to the woman to whom he was going to make his first exhibition of new character by returning her jewels and making a plea for mercy. That was not going to be an easy job—that confession? Besides, everything depended on whether she would grant his plea or not. Ruin stared again at this angle; for Miss Dounay might hand him over to Benson. Once more he had that distasteful vision of a chalky head and a suit of stripes. The thought produced a physical sensation as if his whole body were being stung by nettles.

But here came a big man down the aisle, his features expressing grave consideration, and his gray eyes twinkling with evident satisfaction. It was Doctor Hampstead. Courage and increase of confidence seemed to come into the office with the minister, and more was imparted by his cordial hand-clasp, as he leaned close and asked in a low voice:

"You got the Wadham currency?"

"Yes," Rollie answered eagerly and in an excited whisper told how he had laid the foundation stone of his new character by his I.O.U. left in the place of the currency.

"That is good," agreed the minister, his face beaming. "The right start, my boy, exactly."

Then, with a replica of that smile, sweet as a woman's, with which he had two hours before passed over his vault key to Rollie, he now placed in his hands an envelope like that which had contained the Wadham currency, only thicker. The young man seized it gratefully, but with fingers trembling so he could hardly get behind the flap of the envelope.

"It is there," said the minister, a little gurgle of emotion in his own throat.

"It is here," mumbled Rollie woodenly, a surge of relief and gratitude rising so high in his breast that it felt like a tense hard pain, and for a moment stifled the power of speech so that for want of words he reached out and touched the hand of the minister caressingly with his clammy fingers.

Hampstead, happier, if possible, than Rollie, understood his emotion.

"It's all right," he whispered. "Courage, boy, courage!" At the same time he laid a hand upon the young man's arm, with a pressure almost of affection. With the word and touch came clarity both of thought and feeling.

"Will you excuse me three or four minutes, Brother Hampstead?" Rollie inquired, the sudden leap of joy in his heart that the embezzlement was now to be legitimately wiped out so great that he could not this time stop to send the money across by a messenger.

The minister smiled understandingly, and Rollie stepped out of the little gate and across to the teller's window.

When he returned, old J.M. himself had come out of his office and was chatting with the minister. There was nothing unusual about this, since wherever Hampstead went persons of every sort were anxious to get a word with him. Presently Parma too joined the group at Rollie's desk. Of course the topic of conversation was Miss Dounay and her diamonds, for both the president and the cashier had learned that the minister and their own social ambassador were present at the supper, which every hour became more famous. In the midst of this conversation, a telephone call for Mr. Manton was switched to Rollie's desk.

"Yes," said the president, talking into the 'phone. "We will send a man over to represent us. Are you ready now?"

The bank president hung up the telephone and turned to Rollie. "Step right over to the Central Trust, Burbeck, and see us through on those transfers, will you? They are waiting now."

There was nothing for Rollie to do but to go immediately, much as he desired to whisper one more word of gratitude to the minister, and to receive the additional installment of moral strength which he felt sure would follow from a few quiet minutes with this man on whom his soul had begun to lean so heavily.

"Certainly, Mr. Manton," he answered, and then as he reached for his hat, he turned to the minister, saying: "Shall I find you here when I return?"

"That depends on how long before you return," laughed the minister, but the blandness of his expression indicated that he was in no hurry, and Rollie went out expecting to see him again in a few minutes.

But the matter of the transfers was not so easily dispatched. Over one detail and another the young man was held for nearly forty minutes. The delays, too, were of that vexatious sort which detained him without employing him; so that most of the irritating interval could be and was devoted to a consideration of his own very private and very pressing affairs.

Giving up hope of finding the minister in the bank upon his return, he addressed both his thoughts and his fears to the subject of Miss Dounay and her diamonds. The prospective interview with this passionate, self-willed, and no doubt wildly excited woman loomed before him oppressively, and the nearer it drew, the more ominous it seemed. A man going unarmed to return a stolen cub to a tigress in a jungle lair would be going upon a mission of peace and safety compared to his. He feared that in her passionate vehemence she would never permit him to get the full truth before her. How was he to turn aside the impact of her sudden burst of rage? She would assault him—tear him! If that curious Morocco dagger he had seen some of the guests fumbling with last night were at hand, she might even kill him.

The idea occurred to him that he had best lie to her, or at least begin by lying to her; that he might play the rôle of restorer of her diamonds, and put her under a debt of gratitude, explaining that the thief had brought them to him to borrow money on them; then, in the softer mood that would come through joy over their prospective recovery, he might elaborate the story, touch her sympathies, and make his full confession. She might even be happy enough over their recovery to cease the hunt for the criminal, and thus make confession unnecessary. That in itself would be a great relief.

Yet the common sense, if not the moral sense, of the young man rejected a proposal to lay the bricks of new-found honesty in the mortar of a lie. If he were true to the trust which Hampstead had reposed in him, he would walk straight into Miss Dounay's apartments and say, "Here are your diamonds. I am the thief. I throw myself upon your mercy!" This was what he resolved to do.

Reentering the bank, young Burbeck walked first to the open door of Mr. Manton's office. That gentleman was engaged with a caller, but the shadow at the door caused his eye to rove in that direction. Rollie waved his hand; J.M. nodded. The transfers had been accomplished; the president had taken note of that fact, and the assistant cashier's mission was discharged.

Rollie went immediately to his desk. There was a litter of papers representing matters of greater or less importance which had required attention during the interval of his absence from the office. He sifted them quickly. Some received his penciled O.K. and went into a basket for the messenger; two or three took him on errands to other desks about, or to the windows opposite; the rest went into a drawer. He had not removed his hat from his head, for he proposed to go immediately to Miss Dounay before the remnants of his fast oozing resolution could entirely trickle away.

But when he turned to pick up the vault key which his eye had seen so many times this morning, it was not at hand. He removed everything from the desk, he searched every nook and cranny of it. He took up the waste-basket, dumped the contents upon his desk, and examined every scrap and fold of envelope or paper. He even got down upon his knees and made sure the key was not upon the carpet, going so far as to move the desk. The key had disappeared. He searched his own pockets, realizing that when he left the bank that was where the key should have been placed.

In the excitement of the moment when Hampstead had brought in the money that saved him from being a defaulter, and in the disconcerting presence of J.M. and Parma, when he wanted to be alone with his benefactor, and especially with the more disconcerting instruction to go out and look after the transfers, he had, for the time being, forgotten the key. Now it was not to be found.

Rollie stood nonplussed first, and then aghast. His guilty conscience instantly suggested that some one had seen or suspected his visit to the vault and what had occurred there. This idea brought a rush of blood to the head. He was dizzy and had almost an attack of vertigo. Yet with a few clearing minutes of thought, the explanation leaped plainly into mind. Doctor Hampstead had taken the key. In the interval while Rollie was at the teller's window, he must have seen it lying there upon the desk, recognized it by the red rubber band, and having been assured that the key had served its purpose, had done the perfectly natural thing of dropping it in his pocket, and thinking no more of it.

Where was the minister now? Until Rollie could find him and get the key, he could make no confession to Miss Dounay.

CHAPTER XXVI

UNEXPECTEDLY EASY

Following his instincts rather than any rule of sense, Rollie hurried out upon the street, posted himself upon a conspicuous corner, and for several minutes indulged the wildly improbable hope that he might spy the minister passing in the throng. When a little reflection had convinced him that this was time wasted, he made a hasty inventory of near-by places where his benefactor might have gone, and even went so far as to hurriedly visit two of them, threading the tables of the Forum Café, where sometimes Hampstead ate his luncheon, and scanning the chairs in the St. Albans barber shop, where from time to time the dominie's tawny fleece was shorn.

But by this time a new probability forced itself into the distracted young man's consciousness. This was that the minister had gone to pay his sympathetic respects to Miss Dounay and condole with her over her loss. Rollie was so near the Dounay apartment that to go upstairs and inquire if the minister were there would have been easy, but the peculiar circumstances made it difficult. Indeed only to recall how near he was to that fearsome lair of the tigress threw him into cold shivers and made him fly to the safer vantage ground of the telephone upon his own desk at the bank. But even merely to inquire for the Reverend John Hampstead from there was hard. In his nervous state, depleted by gloomy forebodings and now unfortified by the possession of the diamonds, Rollie felt utterly unequal to even a long-distance contact with that high-powered personality. All the morning he had been in terror lest she herself should call him up. All the morning he had known that in his character as an interested friend he should have telephoned to her. Now, the moment she recognized his voice, he would be taxed with this breach! What was he to say? Why, that he had not telephoned because he was intending to call in at the first moment he could get away from the bank, and that he would be up very soon now. She would be sarcastic, but the explanation would positively have to do. Besides, he had to locate the minister! and so, struggling to command a tone of indifference, he gave the St. Albans number.

Of course Julie or the secretary would answer, anyway. But evidently Miss Dounay, in her highly aroused mental state, was keeping an ear upon the telephone bell, for it was her own animated note that rasped at him through the instrument. It appeared, mercifully, that she did not recognize his voice,—a fact which at first relieved him, but on later reflection, at the conclusion of the incident, shook his remaining self-confidence still further to pieces, for it showed how completely out of hand he had allowed himself to get.

When, moreover, Rollie launched his timid inquiry if the Reverend John Hampstead was there, he got a negative so sharp that the receiver seemed to bite his ear. He broke the connection hastily and sat eyeing the telephone apprehensively, expecting the mouthpiece to open like a solemn eye, scan him inquiringly, and report to Miss Dounay. When it did not, he shrugged his shoulders and elongated his neck to get rid of that noose-like feeling which had just come upon him from nowhere. He had not killed anybody. What was the noose for, then? But this reflection got a most disagreeable answer: "It would kill your mother to know you are an embezzler and a thief. You would then be her murderer." Again he shrugged himself free of the distasteful sensation. "Buck up, Burbeck," he commanded himself, "or you are done for." Once more he grabbed the telephone, and this time more determinedly, for in the midst of his misery one really first-class inspiration had come to him: this was to communicate with the county jail. The minister was really much more likely to have friends in the county jail than in the St. Albans; and it was a safe wager that he went there more frequently. Rollie knew the jailer well.

"Hello—Sam," he called. "This is Rollie. Has Doctor Hampstead been there this morning?"

"Yeh!"

"There now?"

"Nope."

"Know where he went?"

Evidently Sam turned to some one else in the room for information. Rollie heard a voice answering him and caught the words "San Francisco" and "Red Lizard."

"Did you get that?" called Sam into the 'phone. "He's gone to San Francisco."

"Yes,—but what's that got to do with the Red Lizard?"

"He came down to see the Red Lizard."

"The Red Lizard!" Rollie could not restrain a gasp, and then wondered if gasps are transmitted over the telephone—but went on to ask: "Is the Red Lizard in?"

"Yeh!"

"What for?"

Rollie was clinging to the telephone now like a drowning man to a rope's end.

"He got in some kind of a row with a service elevator man at the St. Albans last night and landed on him with the brass knucks. This morning the judge gave him three months in the county."

Rollie clenched his teeth, and his shoulders rocked for a moment. So that was what happened to the Red Lizard! What a long time ago last night was! How many things had happened! Last night he was a crook and a defaulter. To-day he was an honest man, and his accounts would bear the scrutiny of an X-ray. Now if only those diamonds—

But Sam had gone right on talking.

"We think Doctor Hampstead went to San Francisco on some sort of errand for the Lizard—Red's got a woman sick over there or something. But, say, the parson telephoned his house before he left here, and they can tell you sure."

"All right, thanks."

"So long, Rollie!"

Gone to San Francisco! Worse and worse. Rollie huddled in his chair. But there was still a grain of hope. Sam might be mistaken, or the trip might be a short one, or the minister might have left a telephone number that would reach him.

But the voice of Rose Langham dashed these hopes one by one. Her brother had gone to San Francisco on an uncertain quest; he would not be back until very late at night, and he had no idea himself where in the city his search would lead him.

For the second time that day Rollie found himself in a state bordering on physical collapse. The very stars were fighting against him. After the strain of a year in which the fear of detection, however masked, had always been present, his nerves were in none too good condition, anyway. The events of the last twenty-four hours had racked them to the limit of self-control. And yet, when safely past the danger of discovery of his defalcation, the growing sense of the enormity of the crime of theft had brought him to a point where in sheer self-defense he felt he must seize the jewels and literally fling them at their owner. Now, goaded, tricked, tantalized, defeated—everything was in a conspiracy against him! It was enough to drive a man insane. Burbeck felt himself very near the maniacal point. Again he was seeing things. One moment the street outside was full of patrol wagons, all ringing their gongs at once, while platoons of police were marching and surrounding the bank. Another moment he had decided to anticipate the police by rushing out to the corner by the plaza, tossing his hat high in the air, and shouting and shrieking until a crowd had gathered, when he would exhibit the diamonds and proclaim himself the thief.

But he was spared the possibility of this insane freak by the fact that he could not exhibit the diamonds. They were in the vault. Damn the vault! To hell with them! To hell with everything! To hell with himself! That was where he was going!

Suddenly he looked up, trembling. Mercer, the assistant cashier whose desk was next to his own, must have overheard him. But no, Mercer was calmly writing. He had heard nothing, because nothing had been spoken. Rollie had been thinking in shouts, not speaking. And yet he looked about him wonderingly, like a man coming out of a temporary aberration.

"I will be shouting it next," he said to himself. "I am getting dotty; I'll burst if I have to hold this much longer. I'll burst and give the whole thing away."

His hat had been pushed back from his brow; he drew it forward and down until it shaded his face, and then with his jaws set in the most determined mood he could muster, he walked out of the bank and piloted his steps, with knees that were sometimes stiff and sometimes tottering, in the direction of the Hotel St. Albans.

Without waiting to be announced, he went up and knocked at the door of Miss Dounay's apartment. It was opened a mere crack to reveal a nose and a bit of an eyebrow. This facial fragment belonged to Julie, and with it she managed to convey an expression at once forbidding and inquisitorial.

"Oh, la la!" she exclaimed, after her survey. "It is the handsome man. Come in," and the door swung wide. "Madame will be glad to see you. Perhaps you bring the diamonds."

Julie said all this in her slight but charming accent with an attempt at good-humored vivacity, but that last was a very embarrassing remark to a caller in young Mr. Burbeck's delicate position. It caused one of his knees to knock sharply against the other as he manoeuvered to a position where he could lean against a heavy William-and-Mary chair, and thus remain standing until Miss Dounay should enter the room; since to sit down and then rise again suddenly was a feat that promised to be entirely beyond him.

Moreover, light as had been Julie's manner, Rollie saw that her appearance belied it. Her eyes were red, her sharp little nose was also highly colored, and in her hand was a tight ball of a handkerchief that had been wetted to such compactness by tears.

Mercifully Miss Dounay did not leave time for the young man's apprehensions to increase. She entered almost as Julie disappeared, wearing something black and oddly cut, a baggy thing, like a gown he remembered once seeing upon a sculptress when at work in her studio. It was the nearest to an unbecoming garb that he had ever known Marien to wear, and yet unbecoming was hardly the word. It did become her mood, which was somber. Her face was pale, and there were shadows beneath her eyes. She looked subdued, defeated even; but by no means broken. There were hard lines about her mouth, lines which Rollie had never seen there before. She wore a sullen expression, and a passion that was volcanic appeared to smoulder in her eyes. She greeted him rather perfunctorily, as if her mind had been brooding and, after bidding him be seated and sinking herself upon a couch, cushion-piled as usual, shrouded herself again in a state of aloofness which reminded him of the weather when a storm is brooding.

Rollie had expected her to be raging like a wild woman,—alternately hurling anathemas at the thief for having stolen her gems and heaping denunciations upon the police because they had not already captured the criminal and recovered the necklace.

Her apparent indifference to that subject only emphasized to Rollie what he had before observed,—that it was impossible ever to forecast the mind of this woman upon any subject, or under any circumstances. At the same time, the young man was extremely grateful for this abstraction, because it made what he had to do vastly easier.

"I suppose," he ventured huskily, "you are worried to death about your diamonds."

The sentence drew one lightning flash from her eyes, and that was all.

"To tell you the truth, I have hardly thought of them," she snapped.

Rollie sat with open mouth, totally unable to comprehend, staring until his stare annoyed her.

"I say I have hardly thought of them," she repeated, with an asperity entirely sufficient to recall the young man from his amazement at her manner to the real object of his visit.

"But wouldn't you like to get your diamonds back?" he asked perspiringly.

"Of course, silly!" the actress replied, not bothering to conceal the fact that she regarded Burbeck as a child, sometimes useful and sometimes a nuisance. Apparently, she had hailed his advent because her ill humor required a fresh butt, Julie's face having indicated clearly that she had been made to suffer to the breaking point.

But Rollie was in no position to insist upon niceties of speech or manner. He had a trouble compared to which all other troubles of which he had ever conceived were nothing at all. He was haunted by a terrible fear, and to escape its torture he plumped full in the face of it by blurting:

"I have come to tell you that you are going to get your diamonds back."

If Marien's demeanor were a pose, it must have proved that she really was what her press agents claimed,—the greatest actress on the English speaking stage. She did not start, or speak. For a few seconds not even the direction of her glance was changed. Then her face did shift sufficiently for the black piercing eyes to stab straight into Rollie's, while her brows were lifted inquiringly. The glance said, "Well, go on!"

The young man obeyed desperately: "I am an ambassador for the—"

Still Miss Dounay did not speak; she did not move nor change an expression even; and yet Rollie felt himself interrupted. He could not tell how this was done, but he was sure that this woman had detected him in the first note of insincerity and by a thought-wave had emphatically said, "Don't lie to me!"

All at once, too, he realized that this motionless, marble-lipped creature sitting there before him was more implacable, more potential for evil than the raging tigress he had expected to confront. He felt somehow that she was not a woman, but a super-devil into whose clutches he was being drawn. He even had a sense that he was not going to be allowed any increased issue of moral stock on the ground of telling this woman the truth. He was going to tell her the truth because he had to, because she hypnotized it out of him.

"I say," he began, and stopped to wet his lips, but found his tongue so furred that it could not function in that behalf. "I say," he went on again, croaking hoarsely, "that I am the thief."

"You? The banker?"

Rollie fell to wondering how blue vitriol bites. Certainly it could not be more biting than the sarcasm in look and tone with which the woman had asked this question.

"Yes, I—"

The young man was going to prepare the soil for throwing himself upon her mercy—this woman whom he was now positive knew no such thing as mercy—by telling her about his defalcation; but in the wooden state of his mind, one quivering gleam of intelligence suggested that it was quite unnecessary to tell her anything about his defalcation; that it might give her an added set of pincers for the torture she might choose to inflict.

"Yes, I stole them," he affirmed doggedly. "And I am going to bring them back."

"Going to?" she asked, again making the fine shade of her meaning clear with the slightest expenditure of sound.

"Yes, a little accident happened."

"An accident!" The woman's eyes blazed, her cheeks were aflame, and her whole attitude expressive of menace. "You didn't lose them?"

"I only lost control of them for a few hours through a bit of stupidity," he confessed, and hurried on to explain: "For safe keeping this morning I locked them in John Hampstead's safe deposit box, and he went off with the key. He's wandering around the tenderloin of San Francisco now on an errand for a man in the county jail, and they don't even expect him home before to-morrow morning. We can get them—"

Again Rollie felt himself mentally interrupted, although Miss Dounay had not spoken.

This time, however, her features did change unmistakably. She had been listening with a cynical expression that somehow suggested the manner of a cat about to pounce; and suddenly this manner had departed. It was succeeded by a look of surprise and then of thoughtful interest, followed by that indefinable something which bade him cease to speak. He paused abruptly with his tongue in air, as it were; yet she neither spoke nor looked at him. Her features were a sort of moving picture of complex and swift-flying mental processes which succeeded one another with astonishing rapidity and ended in a queer expression of glory and triumph, while she stiffened her body and drew a full breath so quickly that the air whistled in her narrowing nostrils.

Then, as if becoming suddenly aware of the visitor's presence, Miss Dounay turned her eyes directly upon him and exclaimed, with a manner quite the most pleasant she had yet displayed:

"Oh, I beg your pardon, Mr. Burbeck. Something you said started such an interesting train of thought."

Her cordiality extended to the point of reaching out a hand and laying it reassuringly upon Rollie's arm, while she asked, and this time with a tone of real consideration:

"Will you be kind enough to tell me again, very carefully, and a little more in detail, just why you couldn't bring the diamonds to-day?"

Rollie, greatly relieved at this softening in Marien's mood at the very point where he had feared she might actually leap on him and throttle him, retold the story, only being careful to omit all reference as to why he chanced to be visiting Doctor Hampstead's box, and why Doctor Hampstead happened to come into his office so that he might pick up the key, as he did.

"What an odd coincidence!" commented Marien, when the recital was finished. Actually, she was laughing. Rollie's heart went out to her completely. He felt a sting of self-reproach at the harshness of his judgment of her, and was sensible of a new charity growing in his life for all mankind. It was really going to be made easy for him to take "the way up." He felt like singing a little psalm of thanksgiving.

"And the minister has no idea that the diamonds are in his vault?" that mercurial lady inquired, with a chuckle.

"Not the least in the world," assured Rollie, anxious to relieve his benefactor of any slightest odium of indiscretion.

"And when did you say Doctor Hampstead was expected home from San Francisco?"

Miss Dounay had stopped laughing and had an intent look, as if desiring to understand something very clearly.

"Perhaps the last boat to-night—possibly not till to-morrow morning."

"Then there is no way of getting the jewels until to-morrow morning?"

"None at all," confessed Rollie. "But as a matter of fact, they are perfectly safe there—safer than they are in your own apartment."

"So I should say," Miss Dounay observed dryly, "unless I revise my guest list."

Rollie flushed.

"That was coming to me," he confessed, frowning at himself. "That and much more."

His tone was serious and full of bitter self-reproach. Miss Dounay's surprisingly indulgent attitude emboldened him to pursue the disagreeable subject farther.

"I have not told you," he went on, "that I came to ask you for mercy."

"Do you not perceive that you are getting it without asking?" the actress replied, with a liquid glance that was really full of gentleness and sympathy.

"Of course," Rollie averred. "But I am so grateful that I did not want you to think I could take it for granted. I was in a terrible position, Miss Dounay. The crime was not accidental, but deliberate; that it miscarried was the accident. But that your diamonds are to be restored to you, and that I myself am on my way to a sort of character restoration, if I ever had any, which I begin to doubt, is all due to one good friend whom I saw to-day, and who is also a good friend of yours."

Again Rollie was interrupted; but this time there was nothing intangible about it.

Miss Dounay's face grew suddenly hard; cruel lines that were tense and threatening appeared about her mouth, while her eyes bored straight into his, as she exclaimed: "Never mind about that now. As for the theft: you need never hear from me one word about what you have done. The only injunction that I lay upon you is to keep absolute silence about it yourself. Remember, no matter what comes to pass, you know nothing and have nothing to say. So long as you are silent, I will protect you absolutely. Break the silence, and you will go where you belong!"

Of all the hard glances Miss Dounay had given young Burbeck, the look which accompanied this last menacing sentence was positively the hardest. A spasm of mortal terror wrung the young man's heart, as he saw how deliberately implacable this woman could be, and how completely he was in her power.

But presently, Miss Dounay, as if suddenly ashamed of her outburst of feeling over so slight an occasion, broke into radiant smiles, took Rollie by the arm, and led him a few steps in the direction of the door. Her manner was gracious and almost affectionate, proclaiming that at least as long as all went well with her moods, the whole wretched incident was past and forgotten absolutely.

As if to make this emphatically clear, she inquired:

"And when is it that you go out with Mrs. Ellsworth Harrington upon her launch party?"

"With Mrs. Harrington's launch party?" Rollie asked, in a dazed voice, his mind groping as at some elusive memory.

"Yes," the actress replied crisply. "You told me yesterday you were going out to-day with her party for a cruise on the Bay."

"Yesterday!" confessed Rollie dreamily. "By Jove, so I did. But," and as though it made all the difference in the world, "that was yesterday!"

"And isn't to-day to-day?" Miss Dounay asked significantly. "Going to buck up, aren't you?" she continued with intimate friendliness of tone. "You are still to continue as the Amalgamated's social ambassador?"

"Why, of course," the young man replied, although weakly, for after what he had passed through of hope and fear in the past few hours and even the past few minutes, he felt quite unequal to any such prospect as the immediate resumption of his social duties.

But it was a part of the swiftly forming plans of the strong willed woman that he should take them up immediately, and she cleverly recalled his mind to the necessity of special attention to Mrs. Harrington's projects by inquiring tentatively: "I suppose Mrs. Harrington was very much put out because I did not attend her dinner last night?"

"I should say!" confessed Rollie, turning a wry face at the memory.

"Suppose," suggested Miss Dounay in calculating tones, "that I went with you upon her launch party this afternoon."

"You? Oh! Miss Dounay!" Rollo exclaimed, with another of his looks of dog-like gratefulness. "Could you be as good as that? Why, say!" and the young man's enthusiasm actually began to kindle. "You'd undo the damage of last night and fix me with her for life. Positively for life; because," and he hesitated while an expression half ludicrous and half painful crossed his face; "because you are ten times as big a social asset now that—that—" he could not bring himself to finish the sentence.

But Miss Dounay relieved him of his embarrassment by appearing not to notice and broke in with a practical question:

"What time does the launch leave the pier?"

"At four. It is now one-thirty."

For a moment Miss Dounay's brow was threaded with lines of thought, as if she were making calculations and tying the loose ends of some project together in her mind.

"Yes," she said, her face clearing and a look of impish happiness coming into her eyes, "I can go. It will be a delightful relief. I have been bored beyond measure by my own company to-day. Come here at three-thirty and François will take us to the pier."

CHAPTER XXVII

THE FIRST ALARM

Doctor Hampstead was more successful than he had dared to hope in his quest for the woman of the underworld to whom the Red Lizard, from his position in the county jail, acknowledged a tardy obligation. By five o'clock the sufferer was located, her condition inquired into, and the services of a nurse from the Social Settlement near by arranged for, with instructions that the minister be notified of any serious change in the patient's condition.

His breast warmed comfortably with the sense of duty done, the clergyman made his way toward the water front, congratulating himself that he would get the six o'clock boat and be at home in time for dinner; but as he walked through the ferry building, his eye was caught by a headline in one of the evening papers. "MINISTER TO BE ARRESTED" it proclaimed in tall characters of glaring black; and he reflected cynically at the eagerness with which the headline makers seize upon that word "minister" or any of its synonyms. It made the black letters blacker when they spelled minister, priest, or clergyman.

Wondering what preacher could have got himself in trouble, and feeling a slight sense of resentment at the creature, whoever he might be, to have thus brought notoriety and possible dishonor upon the calling, Doctor Hampstead bought a copy of the paper from fat Hermann of the crutch and red face, who has stood so many years at the ferry gate; but reading no farther than the headline, he doubled the paper in his hand and elbowed his way through the crowd to a seat on the exposed upper deck of the ferryboat. Wearied from the exertions of his day, the minister found temporary diversion in watching the fountains of humanity gushing up the stairways. Many of the people he knew, and those who saw him nodded as they passed. Once or twice it struck him that there was something peculiar in these glances of recognition, a startled look of surprise or wonder that he could not quite understand. Occasionally the bold look of a man he did not know but who apparently recognized him had in it a quality of cynicism or of gloating.

With a disagreeable feeling of embarrassment which he did not undertake to explain, the minister turned away from the crowd and fell to watching the sweep of bay and the plowing craft upon it. The fresh salt breeze was very grateful to his face and lungs after the noisome alleys through which his mission had taken him. The water this evening was amethyst blue, and under the prows of the passing boats broke into foam of marble whiteness. The sky above was a pure turquoise, except towards the west, where the descending sun kindled a conflagration of glory in the low-lying clouds. All this wealth of refreshing color and the tonic in the stiffening breeze made the world not only seem fresh and pure, but full of power; as if to give assurance that the ocean and the coming night were big enough and strong enough to swallow all the unpleasantness and all the weakness and wickedness of men, and send the sun up to-morrow morning upon a new day that was fresh and pristine, like the day of creation itself.

Hampstead remembered his prayer of the morning that this particular day might be a great one, and felt a trifle disappointed. In a kind of a way it had been big. Rollie Burbeck had come to him, broken and cowering. He had helped him; he believed he had saved him. Surely, for the time being, he had saved that gifted mother of his from the awful shock of knowing that her son was a defaulter and a thief. True, he had plunged heavily in rescuing that boy; yet the money came from people who believed in Hampstead sufficiently to give him of their surplus wealth for just such ventures. If the effort failed, they would regret the loss of the man more than the loss of the money.

Yet the minister really believed that Rollie was going to take the "way up", and assuring himself once more of this, fell to wondering how Miss Dounay received the penitent when he brought back the diamonds, and whether she had acted generously or spitefully. Speculating next whether the story of the return of the diamonds had been given to the newspapers yet, and anxious to know how they had handled it, if it had, Hampstead bethought him of the paper in his hand and unfolded it for inspection.

But the make-up of the front page forced his attention back upon the matter of the minister who was to be arrested. The sub-head startled him, for it contained his own name, while the opening sentence revealed that it was himself who was to be arrested, and that the occasion of the arrest was the charge that he had stolen the Dounay diamonds.

At the first impact of this astounding piece of news, an exclamation of amazement broke from the minister's lips; but immediately his teeth were set hard as his eye dived down the column, lapping up the words of the story by sentences and almost by paragraphs.

Miss Dounay, it appeared, had gone to the office of District Attorney Miller at three o'clock that afternoon by appointment, and had there sworn to a complaint, charging him, the Reverend John Hampstead, with the theft of her diamond necklace, valued at twenty-two thousand dollars. There were a few lines of an interview with District Attorney Miller, in which that official stated that at first he had not regarded Miss Dounay's charges seriously, but that the actress was so emphatic in her demand for the warrant of arrest that he had not felt himself justified in refusing it. At the same time, the District Attorney expressed his personal belief in the innocence of the minister.

An attempt to serve the warrant immediately, the story said, had been frustrated by the temporary absence of the Reverend Hampstead in San Francisco upon one of his accustomed missions of mercy.

The article concluded with the statement that while it was generally known that Doctor Hampstead was one of Miss Dounay's guests on the night before, the report that he had been charged with the theft of the diamonds was everywhere received with a smile, and there was some harsh criticism of the District Attorney for issuing a complaint, the only effect of which must be to gratify the enemies of the clergyman, and to lessen his influence, thus hampering him in the good work he was doing in the community. This would be all to no purpose, since even a preliminary hearing must be sufficient to show that there was no evidence against him, and that the complaint itself was due to the extravagant suspicion of a highly nervous woman, laboring under great emotional strain.

That the actress herself, a woman of moods and caprices, had no adequate appreciation of the seriousness of her act in thus attacking the character of Doctor Hampstead was made evident to the reporters, when a telephone call to her apartments revealed that in the very hour when an endeavor to serve the warrant of arrest was being made, the actress was leaving her hotel in the company of a well-known young business man for a pleasure cruise upon the Bay.

The minister saw with satisfaction how completely the facts as developed had been edited into a story, the assumptions of which were entirely favorable to him. That was good. It was also right. That in itself would show this reckless woman that the people would refuse to believe ill of him upon the word of any mere stranger.

Nevertheless, reflection on the sheer impudence of the woman's attack made Hampstead angry, and with a quick, nervous movement he crushed the paper into a ball and hurled it over the side.

Was there ever a story of blacker ingratitude? Was there ever a weaker, more craven specimen of a man? Was there ever a more clever, more devilish woman?

So this was the way she made good her threat. She had set this trap, had persuaded Rollie to pretend to steal the diamonds and to make a false confession to him, during which the minister had actually sealed the diamonds in one of his own envelopes. John wished he could be sure whether the young rascal actually took the diamonds away with him, as he appeared to do, or whether he didn't drop them in a drawer of the desk or about the study, where a search would reveal them.

With facial expression quite unministerial Hampstead's mind raced on to the question whether the story of the defalcation was also trumped up? But at this point his excited mental processes halted, puzzled for a moment; and then abruptly his face cleared, as he saw the untenableness of his suddenly conceived theory. No; it would not do. Rollie had undoubtedly been perfectly sincere, and this scheming Jezebel of a woman had merely taken advantage of him in the moment of confession, and made him either consciously or unconsciously, and perhaps helplessly, a tool of her desperate vengeance.

And vengeance for what? Hampstead kept asking himself that, and never got farther with an answer than the rage of a self-centered, heartless woman at his failure to pay the supreme tribute to vanity by making love to her as once he had done, and giving her the gloating satisfaction of spurning him as she had spurned him before. This was the extent of his crime against her, and this bold, bald attempt to destroy him was the punishment she had devised. Heavens! Had the woman no sense of responsibility at all? No consciousness of all the terrible harm she would be doing to so many others besides himself if she succeeded in ruining him? Think of the men and women who trusted him, the young boys and girls to whom he was pointed out as a shining example, the struggling people who found inspiration and courage in the spectacle of his own dauntless battlings for the right.

John felt that it was not egotism to think of himself in this way. He knew it as a fact because he had to know it, because men told him so continually, and because it was a supremely steadying influence upon his own life. He dared not swerve. Rollie Burbeck was not the only man in the community who owed him for escape from a fall, or who was toiling laboriously upward, with an eye on the minister climbing far above and turning cheerfully to beckon or lower an Alpine rope for part of the weakened climber's load.

And the Dounay woman knew all of this. Some of it he had shown to her in the hope that it would be an inspiration. Some of it she had seen for herself. But now, in her malice and hatred, she took no account of all that. Unable to make him swerve, she was wickedly determined to hurl him down. And having used Rollo Burbeck this far, John had no doubt at all that her genius would be entirely equal to using him still further, by binding him to absolute secrecy as to his knowledge of the minister's innocence.

But this thought brought home another with shocking force,—the realization that Rollie, the one man who could vindicate him of this charge must not vindicate him! For Rollie to speak and ruin himself seemed only fair, rather than for the minister to be ruined; yet for the young man to confess would be a terrible blow to the mother,—would in fact most likely kill her. That was unthinkable. That blow must be prevented at all hazards.

But even eliminating the mother, and supposing the young man too craven to speak out for himself, Hampstead knew, thinking back a few hours, that on his honor as a minister he had sealed his own lips concerning the young man's confession; he had hinged his appeal to the moral consciousness of that misguided youth upon his own fealty as a priest of God to the sacred trust of confession. How presumptuous this afternoon sounded that speech which he had made to the wretched penitent this morning with such easy assurance.

Yet, presumptuous or not, Hampstead's reasonings had led him quickly to the one outstanding fact: His knowledge of who did steal the diamonds could never be used in his defense. His vindication must depend solely on the inability of Miss Dounay to prove her case. This in itself put him in a negative and an unnatural position, an all but helpless position. His nature was aggressive. He was a fighter, not a "stander." Instead of vindication, he could never get more than a Scotch verdict of "not proven." He would have to face the community with that. Well, thank God, he was strong enough for that; strong enough to simply stand and endure! Yes, testing his moral fiber by the best judgment he could form of what the strain would be like, he felt equal to the load. In the consciousness of this strength, his shoulders stiffened with pride and a sort of eagerness to take up their burden. A sense of triumph even came to him. This self-deluding woman should see how strong he was, and how unshakable was the faith of the community in the integrity of his character.

But when the minister, rather calmed by having hardened himself thus against what appeared to be coming upon him, lifted his eyes suddenly from the deck, he was disconcerted to observe a group of people eyeing him curiously at a distance of some dozen or twenty feet. These were people whom he did not recognize, but some one of them evidently knew him and had pointed him out to the rest. He reflected that they must have been watching him for some time. No doubt they had observed his demeanor as he read the paper, and afterwards when he tossed it away in anger. He must have made quite an exhibition of himself, and it gave him a creepy sensation to catch these curious, unfeeling eyes upon him as if they viewed the struggles of a fly in a spider's web. It made him feel that he was entangled, and he began to realize what a diversion his entanglement would afford this whole metropolitan community, and that to-night, through the headlines in the papers, everybody was watching him just as these people were. He reflected, too, that there is a fascination about watching the fall of a tall tree, of a tall flagpole, or of a tall human being. At the moment Hampstead did not feel so very tall; yet he knew that deservedly or undeservedly, he was upon a position of eminence, and his fall would afford an interesting spectacle.

However, he did not intend to fall. Rising vigorously from his seat, the minister confronted with a smile the group who had been gazing at him. "Good evening, gentlemen," he said pleasantly, and walked toward the front of the boat.

"Some nerve, what!" was a comment that broke out of the group as he passed it. Whether the words were meant for his ears or not, they reached them and caused another smile.

"I'll show them nerve!" he mused, with foolish but very human pride.

Mingling in the crowd which trampled and elbowed its way off the boat, the minister was careful to bear himself with open-eyed good cheer. He kept his chin up, a self-confident smile upon his face, and his eyes roving for a sight of familiar faces. Whenever he caught the eye of an acquaintance, the greeting he bestowed was hearty and betokened a man without the slightest cause for anxiety of any sort.

Nevertheless, it was disturbing to perceive that people rather avoided his eye. Generally quite the reverse was true, and it was rare upon the boat that some one did not approach him and fall into conversation. Yet so subtle is that mysterious psychology of the social impulse that now a mere publication of the fact that he was to be arrested, even accompanied, as it was, by the statement that nobody believed him guilty, had yet sufficient influence to make him shunned. What a silly world it was, after all!

But in making the transfer from the ferry to the suburban train, there was a walk of two hundred feet, with a news stand on the way, and then fresh disillusionment lay in wait for Doctor Hampstead, in the form of a later edition of another Oakland paper.

"CLERIC FLIES ARREST," bawled this headline stridently.

The minister's lip curled sarcastically at sight of this, but he bought the paper, reading as he walked to the car steps. But the sub-head was more disturbing. "Hampstead's Premises Searched," it declared, the types seeming to scream the words exultantly.

Searched—and in his absence! This was outrageous! More; it was alarming, for there were papers in his study which he had good reason for keeping from the eyes of the police. Fortunately, however, the most important of these were in the safe deposit box. He felt deeply grateful now for this box, the key to which was in his pocket; and after a sympathetic thought for Rose, Dick, and Tayna, and the excited, bewildered state in which they must have received the officers, the clergyman turned his mind to a contemplation of this new account in detail, and thereby got his first real taste of what an unfriendly attitude on the part of a newspaper can make of the most innocent circumstances.

Up to now, the minister, his utterances, his denunciations, even his moral crusades, had been popular. The papers had put the most favorable construction upon all his acts. Their columns and their headlines had done him respect and honor. But now this paper had put every circumstance in the worst possible light. It cleverly touched up those scenes in the picture which looked incriminating and left the others unillumined, until one would never gather from the story that there was any reason to doubt the guilt or the guilty flight of the minister.

Hampstead attributed this to mere unfriendliness, never suspecting that in one hour between editions an editor could have subtly sensed a popular readiness to accept the worst view of his case, and deliberately pandered to it as a mere matter of commercial newsmongering; nor that this unfavorable account was to be accepted as the first straw blown up in a hurricane of adverse criticism which would rise and sweep over the city and blow its very hardest in the aisles of All People's Church itself.

The effect of this narrative upon Hampstead's mind was unspeakably oppressive, and he looked up from its perusal with relief and pleasure at finding a well-known physician in the seat beside him. The doctor was prominent in the work of one of the Encina churches, and had been particularly sympathetic with Hampstead in campaigns against petty crime. The minister had a right, therefore, to feel that this man was one of his friends; yet the physician greeted him with a self-conscious air and immediately relapsed into silence. Hampstead endured this until the humor of the situation forced itself upon him.

"Oh, cheer up," he laughed, poking the physician with an elbow. "You probably know worse people than diamond thieves."

The doctor also laughed and disclaimed any sense of gloom, but his was an embarrassed merriment, and he refrained from meeting the eye of the minister. However, after another interval of silence, as if feeling that he should at any rate say something, he reached over and laid a patronizing hand upon the minister's knee.

"Of course, Doctor Hampstead," he suggested, "every one is confident you will be able to prove your innocence."

The minister made an ejaculation that was short and sharp.

The doctor looked at him with surprise, as if questioning whether he heard aright.

"Under the law, I thought a man was presumed to be innocent, and that his accusers had to prove his guilt," went on Hampstead.

The doctor flushed slightly, and while his eyes roved through the car window, declared:

"Well, I am afraid, Doctor Hampstead, you will find that a public man against whom a charge like this is hurled is presumed to be guilty until he proves himself innocent."

"That is your attitude?" inquired Hampstead coldly.

"Oh, by no means," protested the physician.

"It is his attitude all the same," commented the minister to himself, somewhat bitterly, as he descended from the train at the station nearest his home.

"How does he take it?" asked one sage citizen, crowding into the vacant seat beside the physician, while a second leaned over from behind to hear the answer.

"Very much worried," replied the doctor, as gravely and as oracularly as he would have pronounced upon another man's patient. "Very much worried!"

"Would you believe," the physician inquired presently of the first citizen, with a hesitating and extremely confidential air, "would you believe that Doctor Hampstead would say 'hell'—outside of a sermon, I mean?"

"No," answered the man addressed, "I would not," and his eyebrows were lifted, while his whole face expressed surprise, shock, and a desire for confirmation.

"Well," concluded the doctor enigmatically, "neither would I." And that was all Doctor Mann did say upon the subject, yet citizen number one, while casting the dice with citizen number two at the Tobacco Emporium on the corner next the railroad station to see which should pay for their after-dinner smoke, communicated in confidence that the Reverend Hampstead had, in the stress of his emotion, uttered an oath; in fact, and to be specific, had said that his persecutors, all and singular, and this actress woman in particular, could go to hell!

This conference between citizen one and two may have been overheard. An inference that it was so overheard might have been drawn from the columns of The Sentinel, which next morning concluded its story of the remarkable developments of the night with the observation that the character of the minister was evidently cracking under the strain, since last night upon the suburban train, when a friend addressed him with a solicitous inquiry, the accused clergyman had broken into a stream of profane objurgations loud enough to be heard above the roar of the train in several seats around. It was added that the reverend gentleman quickly regained control of his feelings and apologized for his form of expression by saying that he had been overworked for a long time and the developments of the day had seriously upset him.

John Hampstead read this particular paragraph in The Sentinel with a sense of utter amazement at the wicked mendacity of public rumor, since what he had said to Doctor Mann was merely "Humph!" uttered with sharp and scornful emphasis.

But there was a far bigger story than that in the morning Sentinel. It had to do with those things which happened between the hour when John Hampstead dropped from his train, a little irritated with Doctor Mann, and the hour when he went to bed, but not to sleep.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE ARREST

As the perturbed minister, hurrying from the train, turned into the short street leading toward his home upon the Bay-side, he was charged upon by Dick and Tayna, both of whom, in the state of their emotion, forgot High School dignity and came rushing upon their uncle with feet thudding like running ostriches. Tayna's cheeks were red as her Titian hair with flaming indignation, and her eyes burned like lights, while her full red lips pouted out: "Isn't it a shame?"

"It's a darn piece of blackmail, that's what it is, and it's actionable, too!"

This oracular verdict, of course, came panting from the lips of Dick, who, over-exerted by his run, stood with arms akimbo, hands holding his sides, and his too heavy head tipping backward on his shoulders, while with scrutinizing eye he studied the face of his uncle.

As for Hampstead, in the devoted loyalty of these fatherless children and the distress of mind which each exhibited, he entirely forgot the sense of hot injustice and wrong burning in his own breast. All the emotion he was then capable of turned itself into sympathy for them and solicitous anticipations as to the effect of the whole wretched business upon his sister Rose. With a sweep of his strong arms, he gathered the two young people to his breast, printing a kiss on Tayna's cheek, which he found burning hot, and squeezing Dick until the stripling gasped and struggled for release as he used to do when a squirming youngster. With his arms still affectionately about the shoulders of the two, Hampstead walked on down the street, palm-studded, with flower-bordered skirts of green on either side and the blue vista of the Bay showing dimly in the growing dusk.

Rose was waiting on the piazza. Her face was very calm, yet to John's keen eye, it bore a look of desperately mustered self-control. With the ready intuition of her sex, she had divined far more completely than her brother how desperate and dangerous was the struggle upon which he was entering, and she was determined to give him every advantage that sympathy, poise, and unwavering loyalty could supply.

"It's all right, Rose, all right," he hastened to assure her, as the steps were mounted. "A mere extravagance of an excited woman that the papers have made into a great sensation. It will melt away like fog. We are helpless for a few days until I can demand and receive a hearing upon preliminary trial. That will show that they have no case at all. Until then, we must simply stand and be strong."

Rose was already in her brother's arms, yet his speech, instead of reassuring her, made the tears flow.

"It is so—so humiliating to think of you defending yourself," she protested, "to hear you talk of their inability to make out a case. It seems so—so lowering, as if you were going to be put on trial just like a criminal."

"Why," replied John, "that's just what it all means. Just like a criminal!"

He said the thing strongly enough, but after it came a choke in the throat. He had not really comprehended this before. He had thought of making his defense from the standpoint of the popular idol that he was. As a matter of fact, he was going to trial like any criminal. His vantage ground was merely that of the prisoner at the bar. This prepared him for what Rose had to say next; for subtly perceiving that her brother had sustained an additional shock, her own self-control revived. Wiping her eyes, she turned to lead the way within.

"They," she said solemnly, "are waiting in the study."

"They?" inquired Hampstead.

"There are four men in there," Rose replied. "They want," and her voice threatened to break, "they want you!"

At this bald putting of the horrible fact, Tayna burst into a wail of woe and flung her arms about her uncle, whom she had followed into the hall.

"There, there, girl, don't cry," urged her uncle soothingly. "There is no occasion for it; this is annoying but not necessarily distressing. It is a mere formality of the law which must be complied with. Run along now, all of you, and wash the tears out of your eyes. I will be with you in five minutes. Let us sit down to a happy, cheerful dinner. I confess I am a little upset myself, but not too disturbed to be hungry," and with a weak attempt at grimacing humor, the big man laid a hand upon the region of his diaphragm.

In his study, as Rose had forewarned him, the minister found four men: Searle, Assistant District Attorney; Wyatt, Deputy Sheriff; and two city detectives.

Searle was a suave, resourceful man and the one assistant in the District Attorney's office whom Hampstead had found himself unable to trust; and that rather because of his personal and political associations than for any overt act of which the minister was cognizant.

Wyatt was a bloated person, amiable in disposition, whose excess of egotism was coupled with a paucity of intelligence, yet wholly incorruptible and with an exaggerated sense of duty that made him a capable officer,—a thing with which his breeding, which was obtrusively low, did not interfere.

Hampstead was able to master his feelings sufficiently to greet the quartet urbanely, if not cordially.

"A disagreeable duty, I assure you," conceded Searle.

"A disagreeable experience," laughed Hampstead, but with no great suggestion of levity.

"I guess I don't need to read this to you, Doc," said the Deputy Sheriff, as he opened to Hampstead a document drawn from his pocket. "It is a warrant for your arrest."

The minister took the document and glanced it through, his eyes hesitating for a moment at the name of the complaining witness.

"Alice Higgins?" he asked, with an inquiring glance.

"The true name of the complaining witness and accuser," replied Searle.

"Oh, I see," assented John.

It had never occurred to him that Marien Dounay was only a stage name. Was there anything at all about this woman that was not false, he wondered.

John returned the warrant to Wyatt and caught the look in that officer's eye. A sense of the horrible indignity of arrest came over the minister, a perception of what it meant: this yielding of one's liberty, of one's body to the possession of another, who might be a coarser and more inferior person than one's self. With a guilty flush, John thought how many times in his crusades against the gamblers and small law-breakers he had procured the swearing out of complaints that led to the arrest of scores of men. He had marveled at the venomous hatred which those men later displayed toward himself, regarding him as the author of a public disgrace put upon them, and not upon them alone but upon their families also. Now he understood.

"The bail is fixed at ten thousand dollars," explained Searle smoothly. "When we got your telephone message that you would be home at seven o'clock, I took the liberty of arranging for Judge Brennan to be in his chambers at nine to-night so that you could be there with your bondsmen and not have to spend the night in jail."

"That was very considerate of you," assented the minister, a huskiness in his tone despite himself.

The night in jail! The very idea. And ten thousand dollars bail! He had expected to be released upon his own recognizance. Again that disagreeable intimation of being treated like a common criminal came crowding in with a suffocating effect upon his spirit. But he rallied, exclaiming with another effort at easy urbanity: "Very well, I acknowledge my arrest, and it will be unnecessary to detain you gentlemen further. I shall be glad to meet you with my bondsmen in the judge's chambers."

The Deputy Sheriff coughed in an embarrassed way, but stood stolidly before his prisoner.

"I am sorry, Doctor Hampstead," explained Searle, "but we shall have to search you. Benson's men here will do that."

"Search me?" exclaimed Hampstead, with a sudden sense of insult. "By the appearance of things," he added, while casting a sarcastic look at the signs of disorder about, "I should think this farce had been carried far enough. You did not find the diamonds here. You do not expect to find them upon my person, do you?"

The speaker's tones witnessed a natural indignation and considerable irritability.

"I got to do my duty," replied Wyatt stubbornly, making a sign to the two detectives, who immediately arose and advanced upon the minister.

For an instant the situation was exceedingly tense. Hampstead was a very strong man, and his resentment at what seemed an insult put upon him with malice, was very hot. But good sense triumphed in the interval of thought which the officers diplomatically allowed.

"Oh, of course," he exclaimed with a gesture of submission, "you men are only cogs. Once the machinery of the law is put in motion, you must turn with the other wheels. Pardon my irritation, gentlemen, but the situation is unusual for me and rather hard. I feel the injustice and indignity of it very keenly."

"We appreciate your situation perfectly," said Assistant District Attorney Searle smoothly. "As you say, we are all of us cogs."

Yet the actual search of his person, once entered on, seemed to Hampstead to proceed rather perfunctorily, although at the same time he got from the faces and manner of all four an impression of something they were holding in reserve.

"What is this?" asked one of the detectives dramatically, holding up a long, narrow key with a red rubber band doubled and looped about the neck, which he had just extracted from the minister's pocket.

"That is the key to my safe deposit box at the Amalgamated National," replied Hampstead, naturally enough.

"Then," said Wyatt bluntly, "we've got to search that box."

The minister was instantly on his guard.

Some play of eyes between the four men, accompanied by a subtle change in the expression of their faces, warned him that they must have been apprised of the existence of this box and that the key was the real object of their personal search. Hampstead resolved hastily to defeat them.

"I decline to permit it," he declared shortly. "There are very private papers in that box, things which have been communicated to me in the utmost confidence, and I would not be justified in permitting you—or any one else—to handle them. Under the rules of the bank, without my consent or an order of court, you could not reach the box."

"I have that order of court here," said Searle, speaking up quickly, but with cold precision of utterance, "in a search warrant directed particularly to your safe deposit box."

Like a flash, Hampstead thought that he understood.

"So that is what you are here for, Searle?" he snapped sarcastically, turning and confronting the Assistant District Attorney. "I never have trusted you. I couldn't understand your presence here or your interest in this silly charge; but now I comprehend fully. You have taken advantage of it to get your eyes on the perjury case I have against your bosom friend, Jack Roche. Well, I warn you! This is where I stop and fight!"

But Searle refused to get angry at this bald impugnment of his integrity and motives. No doubt it was his confidence in an ultimate and complete humiliation of the minister that enabled him to maintain an unruffled demeanor while he suggested blandly:

"Perhaps you ought not to proceed further, Doctor Hampstead, without the advice of a lawyer."

The proposal touched the minister in his pride.

"A lawyer?" he objected scornfully. "Thank you, no! My cause requires no expert advocacy. In my experience of the past four years, I have learned quite enough about court practice to cope with this ridiculous burlesque without professional assistance."

Searle, playing his cards deliberately, took advantage of the minister's assumed acquaintance with legal lore to suggest with alacrity:

"You know then, Doctor, that it is useless to fight a court order of this sort, as you spoke of doing in your excitement a moment ago. I think, with the attorneys of your Civic League, you have gone through a safe deposit box or two upon your own account, by means of just such a search warrant as I now exhibit to you."

Again Hampstead's second thought assured him that he was powerless to resist.

"Yes," he confessed resignedly to Searle's speech, after the necessary interval for consideration, "I suppose I must admit it. When I spoke of fighting, I spoke in heat; partly because I feel the gross injustice and bitter wrong this senseless charge is doing to innocent people other than myself, who am also innocent, and partly because, as I have already told you, I utterly distrust your motive in making the whole of this search. You must be as well aware as I that this charge is the work of a woman who, to speak most charitably, is beside herself with excitement."

But Searle only smiled, and observed with urbanity unruffled.

"I am sorry, Doctor, that you distrust me. You may have the privilege, of course, of being present when we examine the contents of the box."

"Naturally I shall insist upon that," said the minister.

"In that case," Searle added with significant emphasis, "I think your observations will convince you that we are solely concerned in a search for the diamonds."

"As I like to believe well of all men, I shall hope so," countered the minister; and then, since the demeanor of the officers made it clear there was no more searching to be done, he continued, after a glance at his watch: "If I am to meet Judge Brennan and yourself with my bondsmen at nine o'clock, I suggest that we go from there direct to the bank vaults. They are accessible until midnight, as you doubtless know."

"Very good, Doctor," replied Searle in that oily voice which indicated how completely to his satisfaction affairs were progressing.

"And now," suggested the minister, with a nod toward the street door, "as the hour is late, I will ask you gentlemen to excuse me."

Searle darted a look at Wyatt.

"Very sorry, Doc, but I got to stay with you," volunteered the deputy, "and hand you over to the judge."

Once more the flush of offense mounted to the cheek of Hampstead. Hand him over to the judge! How galling such language was when used of him! Again he recalled with compunction how many arrests he had caused without an emotion beyond the satisfaction of an angler when he hooks a fish. But he—John Hampstead—minister, preacher, pastor of All People's; a shining light in a vast metropolitan community! Surely it was something different and infinitely more degrading for him to be arrested than for a mere plasterer, or mayhap a councilman? He had a greater right than they to be wrathful and resentful. Besides, they were guilty. Judges, juries, or their own confessions, had unfailingly so declared. He was innocent, spotlessly innocent of the charge against him. His defenselessness proceeded from relations of comparative intimacy with the actress, and his priestly knowledge of the guilty person. Yet the thought of this helped humor and good sense to triumph again, over his rising choler.

"Oh, very well," he exclaimed, half-jocularly, half-derisively. "Make yourself at home; all of you make yourselves at home. We are accustomed to an unexpected guest or two at the table. Be prepared to come out to dinner. Listen, if you like, while an arrested felon telephones to his friends, seeking bondsmen. You may hear secret codes and signals passing over the wire. You may even wish to put under surveillance the gentlemen with whom I communicate."

"Doctor! Doctor!" protested Searle, with hands uplifted comically. "Your hospitality and your irony both embarrass us. The detectives and I will be on our way. Wyatt will have to do his duty."

"As you please," exclaimed Hampstead, who was fast recovering his poise; "quite as you please."

With this speech he held open the outside door and bade the three departing guests good evening; and then, while the Deputy waited in the room, the clergyman was busy at the telephone until he had the promise of three different gentlemen of his acquaintance to meet him at Judge Brennan's chambers at nine that night and qualify as his bondsmen in the sum of ten thousand dollars.

This much attended to, dinner became the next order; but it was not a very happy affair. There had never been a time when the little family group, bound together by ties that were unusually tender, wished more to be alone at a meal. Now, when the superfluous presence was the official representative of the very thing that had plunged them into gloom, the situation became one of torture. Food stuck to palates. Scraps of conversation were dropped at rare intervals and upon entirely extraneous subjects in which nobody, not even the speakers, had the slightest interest. At times there was no sound save the audible enjoyment of his food by their guest, for the Deputy Sheriff, accustomed to the ruthless thrust of his official self into the personal and sometimes the domestic life of individuals, was quite too crass to sense the embarrassment and positive pain his presence caused and was also exceedingly hungry.

In this general silence, the grating of wheels on the graveled walk outside the study door sounded loudly.

"Mrs. Burbeck!" exclaimed Hampstead in some surprise. "She never came to me at night before. Finish your dinner, Deputy. If you will excuse me, I must receive one of my parishioners in the study."

"Sorry, but I can't excuse you, Doc," replied Wyatt jocularly; "but if you'll excuse me for just a minute, while I get away with this second piece of loganberry pie, I'll be with you."

"Be with me?" asked the minister, color rising. "Do you mean that you will intrude upon the privacy of an interview with a helpless lady in a wheel chair who comes to see me alone?"

Wyatt's fat cheek was bulging, and there were tiny streams of crimson juice at the corners of the lips; but he interrupted himself long enough to reply bluntly: "I ain't agoin' to let you out of my sight. Orders is orders, that's all I got to say."

"But tell me, Wyatt, who gave you such orders?" queried the minister, with no effort to conceal his irritation.

"Searle. And they were give to him," answered the Deputy phlegmatically, his fat-imbedded eyes intent upon the white and crimson segment of pastry on his plate.

"And who gave such orders to him?" persisted Hampstead.

"If you ask me—" began the Deputy, and then exasperatingly blotted out the possibility of further speech by the transfer of the dripping triangle to his mouth.

"Well, I do ask you," declared the minister curtly.

"He got 'em from Miss Dounay."

"And is that woman running the District Attorney's office?" questioned the minister scornfully.

"Search me!" gulped Wyatt, with a shrug of his shoulders. "I had one look at her. She's got eyes like a pair of automatics. You take it from me, Doc," and Wyatt laid his unoccupied hand upon the sleeve of the minister, "if she's got anything on you, compromise and do it quick; if she ain't, fight, and fight like h——." Wyatt stopped and shot an apologetic glance around the table. "'Scuse my French," he blurted, "but you know what I mean."

"Yes," said the minister, holding his head very straight, "I realize that you do not mean to insult me."

"Insult you?" argued the Deputy, overflowing with satisfied amiability. "After coming over here to arrest you, and you givin' me a dinner like this? Pie like this? Well, I guess not. I'm bribed, Doc, that's what I am. I got to go in that room with you when you see the old lady; but I'll hold my thumbs in my ears, and I won't see a d—— there I go again." Once more Wyatt's apologetic look swept around the table.

"Mrs. Burbeck is in the study," announced the maid.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE ANGEL ADVISES

Because locomotion was not easy for her, it was to have been expected that the conferences between John Hampstead and Mrs. Burbeck, which, especially in the early days of his pastorate, had been so many, would take place in that lady's home; and they usually did. But as time went on, her own independence of spirit and increased consideration for the minister led Mrs. Burbeck frequently to prefer to come to him. To make this easy, two planks had been laid to form a simple runway to the stoop at the study door. When, therefore, the minister entered his library to-night, closely followed by Wyatt, he found that good woman waiting in the wheel chair beside his desk. The object of her call showed instantly in an expression of boundless and tender solicitude; and yet the clergyman immediately forgot himself in a conscience-stricken concern for his visitor.