HELD TO ANSWER (continued 7)

"You should not have come," he exclaimed quickly, sympathy and mild reproach mingling, while a devotion like that of a son for a mother was conveyed in his tone and glance.

Truly, Mrs. Burbeck had never looked so frail. All but the faintest glow of color had gone from her cheeks; her eyes were bright, but with a luster that seemed unearthly, and her skin had a transparent, wax-like look that to the clergyman was alarmingly suggestive, as if the pale bloom of another world were upon her cheeks, which a single breath must wither.

Making these observations swiftly as his stride carried him to her, the minister, speaking in that rich baritone of melting tenderness which was one of Hampstead's most charming personal assets, concluded with: "You are not well. You are not at all well."

"Oh, yes," the Angel answered, "I am well."

Although she spoke in a voice that appeared to be thin to the point of breaking, her tone was even, and her senses proclaimed their alertness by allowing her eyes to wander from the face of the minister and fix themselves inquiringly over his shoulder on the unembarrassed, stolid man at the door.

"Tell her not to mind me, Doc," interjected Wyatt in a stuffy voice. At the same time an exploratory thumb brought up a quill from a vest pocket, and the deputy began with entire assurance the after-dinner toilet of his teeth, while his eyes roamed the ceiling and the tops of the bookcases as if suddenly oblivious of the presence of other persons in the room.

"Yes," said the minister reassuringly, "we will not be disturbed by Mr. Wyatt's presence. He is merely doing his duty."

"You are—?" Mrs. Burbeck hesitated with an upward inflection, and the disagreeable word unuttered.

"Yes," replied the minister gravely, his inflection falling where hers had risen. "I am."

"Oh, that woman! That woman!" murmured Mrs. Burbeck, "I have mistrusted her and been sorry for her all at once. But it was Rollie that I feared for."

There was a sigh of relief that was as near to an exhibition of selfishness as Mrs. Burbeck had ever approached; after which, mother-like, she lapsed into a rhapsody over her son.

"Rollie," she began, in doting accents, "is so young, so handsome, so responsive to beauty of any sort; so ready to believe the best of every one. I feared that he would fall in love with her and ruin his business career—you know how these theatrical marriages always turn out—or that she would jilt him and break his heart. Rollie has such a sensitive, expansive nature. He has always been trusted so widely by so many people. Since that boy has grown up, I have lived my whole life in him. Do you know," and she leaned forward and lowered her voice to an impressive and exceedingly intimate note; "it seems to me that if anything should happen to Rollie, it would crush me, that I should not care to live,—in fact should not be able to live."

Tears came readily to the limpid pools of her eyes, and the delicately chiseled lips trembled, though they bravely tried to smile.

Hampstead sat regarding her thoughtfully, love and apprehension mingling upon his face. It suddenly reoccurred to him with compelling force that the most awful cruelty that could be inflicted would be for this delicate and fragile woman, who to-night looked more like an ambassadress from some other existence than a thing of flesh and blood, to know the truth about her son. Seeing her thus smiling trustfully through her mother-tears, thinking of all that her sweet, saint-like confidences had meant to him, Hampstead felt a mighty resolve growing stronger and stronger within him.

But for once Mrs. Burbeck's intuitions were not sure, and she misconstrued the meaning of her pastor's silence.

"Forgive me," she pleaded in tones of self-reproach. "Here I am in the midst of your trouble babbling of myself and my son. Yet that is like a mother. She never sees a young man's career blighted but she grows suddenly apprehensive for the child of her own bosom. Now that feeling comes to me with double force. I love you almost as a son. Consequently, when I see my boy out there in the sun of life mounting so buoyantly, and you, so worthy to mount, but struggling in mid-flight under a cloud, I feel a mingling of two painful emotions. I suffer as if struck upon the heart. My spirit of sympathy and apprehension rushes me to you, yet when I get to you, my doting mother's heart makes me babble first of my boy. And so," she concluded, with an apologetic smile, "you see how weak and frail and egotistic I am, after all."

"But," protested Hampstead, who had been eager to break in, "my career is not blighted. I am not under a cloud. It annoyed me to-night upon the boat and train to discover how suddenly I was pilloried by my enemies and avoided by my friends. They seem to take it for granted that I am already smirched; that to me the subject must be painful, and as there is no other subject to be thought of at the moment, hence conversation will also be painful. Because of this I am a pariah, to be shunned like any leper."

With rising feeling, the young minister snatched a breath and hurried on.

"Now, Mrs. Burbeck, I do not feel like that at all. I have put myself in the way of sustaining this attack through following the course of duty, as I conceived it. I need not assure you that I am innocent of a vulgar thing like burglary. I need not assure the public. It is impossible that they should believe it. Nevertheless, I have seen enough in the papers to-night to show how they will revel at seeing me enmeshed in the toils of circumstance. To them it is a rare spectacle. Very well, let it be a spectacle. It is one in which I shall triumph. I propose to fight. I feel like fighting." His fist was clenched and came down upon the arm of his chair, and his voice, though still low, was full of vibrant power.

"I feel that I have the right to call upon every friend, upon every member of All People's, upon every believer in those things for which I have fought in this community, to rally to my side to fight shoulder to shoulder in the battle to repel what in effect is an assault not upon me, but upon the things for which I stand."

Mrs. Burbeck's expressive eyes were floating full with a look that verged from sympathy toward pity.

"You will have to be a very expert tactician," she said soberly, drawing on those fountains of ripe wisdom, so full at times that they seemed to mount toward inspiration; "if you are to make the public think of your embarrassment in that way. It is going to look at this as a disgraceful personal entanglement of a minister with an actress!"

Hampstead writhed in his chair. Nothing but the depth of his consideration for Mrs. Burbeck kept him from exclaiming vehemently against what he deemed the enormous injustice of this assumption.

"She's right, Doc; right's your left leg," sounded a throaty voice, which startled the two of them into remembering that they were not alone.

"Why, Wyatt!" exclaimed the minister reprovingly, turning sharply on the deputy.

"Excuse me, Doc," Wyatt mumbled abjectly. "I just thought that out loud. All the same, she's wisin' you up to somethin' if you'll let 'er. Some of these old dames that ain't got nothin' to do but just set and think gets hep to a lot of things that a hustlin' man overlooks."

Hampstead was disgusted.

"Don't interrupt us again, please, Wyatt," he observed, combining dignity and rebuke in his utterance.

But Wyatt, influenced no doubt by the look almost of fright on Mrs. Burbeck's face, was already in apologetic mood.

"Say," he mumbled contritely, "you're right, Doc. I'm so sorry for the break that, orders or no orders, I'll just step out in the hall while you finish. But all the same, you listen to her," and he indicated the disturbed and slightly offended Mrs. Burbeck with a stab of a toothpick in the air, "and she'll tell you somethin' that's useful."

"Thank you very much, Wyatt," replied the minister in noncommittal tones, but with a sigh of relief as the deputy withdrew from the room.

Yet he had a growing sense of depression. Wyatt's boorish, croaking interruption had thrown him out of poise. Mrs. Burbeck's exaggerated sense of the gravity of the matter weighed him down like lead, and the more because an inner voice, sounding faintly and from far away, but with significance unmistakable, seemed to tell him her view was right. Nevertheless, his whole soul rose in protest. It ought not to be right. It was a gross travesty on justice and on popular good sense.

Mrs. Burbeck, looking at him fixedly, noted this change in spirit and the conflict of emotions which resulted. Reaching out impulsively, she touched the large hand of the man where it lay upon the desk.

"I feared you would take it too lightly," she reflected. "Youth always does that. For this world about you to turn and gnash you is mere human nature, which it is your business to understand. Has it never occurred to you that the same voices who upon Sunday cried out: 'Hosannah, Hosannah to the son of David!' upon Friday shouted: 'Away with him! Crucify him! Crucify him!'"

"But I am innocent," Hampstead protested, though weakly.

"And so was He," Mrs. Burbeck replied simply.

"But He was worthy to suffer. I am not," murmured Hampstead humbly.

"Sometimes," suggested the sweet-voiced woman, "suffering makes us worthy."

"But," affirmed the minister, his fighting spirit coming back to him, "I can prove my innocence!"

The face of Mrs. Burbeck lighted. "Then you must," she said decisively. "You give me hope when you say that. It was to tell you that I came, fearful that you would rely upon the public to assume your innocence until your guilt was proven. Alas, they are more likely to assume the contrary, to hold you guilty until you prove yourself innocent."

"I have been made to see that already," replied Hampstead. "At first, no doubt, I did underestimate the gravity of the situation. You have helped me to appraise its dangers more accurately."

But Mrs. Burbeck had more important advice to give.

"Yes," she went on half-musingly, because tactfulness appeared to suggest that form of utterance, "you will have to vindicate yourself absolutely. It is a practical situation. The danger is not that you will be convicted and sent to jail. Nobody believes that, I should say. The danger is that a question-mark will be permanently attached to your name and character. The Reverend John Hampstead, interrogation point! Is he a thief, or not? Did he compromise himself, or not? Is he weak, or not? This is the thing to fear, the thing that would condemn you and brand you as stripes brand a convict."

For a tense, reflective moment the minister's lips had grown dry and bloodless; and then he confessed grudgingly: "I begin to see that you are right."

"You should begin your defense by a counter-attack," Mrs. Burbeck continued, feeling that the man was sufficiently aroused now to appreciate the importance of vigorous defensive actions. "Declare your disbelief that the diamonds have actually been stolen. Get out a warrant of search, and you will probably find them now concealed among her effects. At any rate this counter-search would hold the public verdict in suspense; and it would be like your well-known aggressive personality. If the search fails to reveal them, if her diamonds really are stolen, your complete vindication must depend upon the capture and exposure of the real thief."

Hampstead wiped his moist brow nervously. It was uncannily terrible that this woman of all persons in the world should say this to him. However, he had sufficient presence of mind to urge:

"But how unjust to force a contract like that upon me."

"It is unjust," admitted the Angel of the Chair. "Yet the innocent often suffer injustice, and you must realize that you are not immune. That is your only course, and I came specifically to warn you of it. Prove there was no theft, or get the thief!"

There was snap and sparkle in Mrs. Burbeck's eyes. Despite her physical frailty, her spirit was stout, and her conviction so forcefully conveyed that the minister delivered himself of a gesture of utter helplessness.

"I cannot do either," he said, half-whispering his desperation. "Yet I think I appreciate better than you how sound your advice has been. But there are reasons that I cannot give you, that I cannot give to any one, why the course which you suggest cannot be followed. I must go another way to vindication; but," and his voice rose buoyantly, "I will go and I will get it."

Mrs. Burbeck received with misgivings her pastor's complete rejection of the advice she had offered, yet some unconscious force in the young minister's manner swept her on quickly against her judgment and her will to an enormous increase of faith, both in the strength and the judgment of the man. As for Hampstead, he concluded his rejection by doing something he had never done before. That was to lean low, his face chiseled in lines of gravity and devotion, and taking the delicate hand of Mrs. Burbeck, that in its weakness was like a drooping flower, lift it to his lips and kiss it.

"Conserve all your spirit," he said solemnly, still clinging tenderly to the hand. "It may be that I shall have to lean heavily upon you."

"You may have my life to the uttermost," she breathed trustfully, never dreaming the thought unthinkable which the words suggested to her pastor and friend. But an extraneous idea came pressing in, and Mrs. Burbeck raised toward the minister, in a gesture of appeal, the hand his lips had just been pressing, as she pleaded: "And do not think too hardly of the woman. She loves you."

"Loves me!" protested Hampstead, with a ghastly hoarseness. "The woman is incapable of love—of passion even. She is all fire, but without heat—though once she had it. She is a mere blaze of ambition. All she cared for was to bring me to my knees, to dangle me like a scalp at her waist."

Mrs. Burbeck steadied him with a glance from a mind unimpressed.

"Be sorry, very sorry for her!" she insisted gravely. "Acquit yourself of no impatience—not even a reproachful look, if you can help it. She is to be pitied. Only the malice of unsated love could do what she has done. Show yourself noble enough, Christ-like enough, to be very, very sorry for her!"

"We got to go if we get there by nine!"

It was the smothered voice of Wyatt, calling through the door.

CHAPTER XXX

THE SCENE IN THE VAULT

Silas Wadham, mine-owner; William Hayes, merchant, and E. H. Wilson, capitalist, subscribed to Hampstead's bond. Each was a big man in his way; each had unbounded faith in the integrity and good sense of the minister. They were not men to be swept off their feet by mere surface currents. They laughed a little and rallied John upon his plight, yet he knew somehow by the bend of the jaw when they dipped their pens in ink and with clamped lips subscribed their signatures, that these men were his unshakably.

One circumstance might have seemed strange. None of them were members of All People's. Yet this was not because there were not men in All People's who would have qualified as unhesitatingly; but because John had a feeling that he was being assailed as a community character rather than as a clerical one.

Within ten minutes the formalities in Judge Brennan's chamber were concluded, Hampstead was free, but as he turned to Searle waiting suavely, backed by the suggestive presence of the two detectives, there came suddenly into his mind the memory that Rollie Burbeck's I.O.U. for eleven hundred dollars was in his safe deposit box in the envelope marked "Wadham Currency." This was a chaos-producing thought. If Searle once got an eye on that card, it would start innumerable trains of suspicion, each of which must center on the young bank cashier. In his present state, that boy was too weak to resist pressure of any sort. He would crumble and go to pieces, And yet, it was not the thought of the exposure and ruin of this spoiled young man that moved Hampstead to another of those acts which only riveted the chains of suspicion more tightly upon himself. It was the vision of the mother who only an hour before had murmured tremulously: "If anything should happen to him, I should not be able to live."

"Searle!" exclaimed the minister passionately. "You must not proceed with this. If you are a man of any heart, you will not persist against my pleadings. I tell you frankly there are secrets in that box which, while they would do you no good, could be used to ruin innocent men—guilty ones, too, perhaps; but the innocent with the guilty."

Hampstead was speaking hoarsely, his voice raised and trembling with an excitement and lack of nerve control he had never exhibited before in public.

The prosecutor's face pictured surprise and even gloating, but his eyes expressed a purpose unshaken.

"Confidences in my possession must be respected," Hampstead went on, arguing vehemently. "The confidences of a patient to his physician, of a penitent to his priest, are respected by the law. Because some of these confidences happen to be in writing, you have no right to violate them."

"And I tell you I have no intention to violate them," Searle returned testily. "My order is a warrant of search for a diamond necklace."

"And I tell you I will not respect the order of the court," blazed the minister. "You shall not examine the box!"

Judge Mortimer was startled; the bondsmen, although surprised by the minister's show of feeling, were sympathetic.

"I do not care whether you consent or not," Searle rejoined sarcastically. "I have the key, and I have the order of court, which the vault custodian must respect. I have done you the courtesy to meet you here so that you might be present when the box was examined. You must be beside yourself to suppose that I can be swayed from my duty, even temporarily, by an appeal like this."

"I think, Doctor, you should have the advice of your attorney on this," suggested Mr. Wilson considerately; and then turning to the Assistant District Attorney, observed sharply: "It seems to me, Searle, that this is rather a high-handed procedure."

But this remark of the practical Mr. Wilson had an instantly calming effect upon the minister.

"No, no," Hampstead exclaimed, turning to his friend; "I do not want an attorney. I do not need an attorney. I should only be misunderstood. It is the thought of what might result to innocent people through an examination of this box that stirs me so deeply."

"All the same, I think we had better have an attorney immediately," declared Wilson. "I can send my car for Bowen and have him here in fifteen minutes."

"An attorney," commented Searle brusquely, "could do nothing except to get an order from a Superior Court judge enjoining the bank from obeying the search warrant of this court. He would be lucky if, at this time of night, he caught a judge and got that under two or three hours. I will be in that box in five minutes. Come along, if you want to."

Searle moved toward the door, followed by the two detectives, his purpose perfectly plain; yet the minister hung back, for the first time so confused by entangling developments that he could not see where to put his foot down next.

"I think, Doctor Hampstead," advised Mr. Wadham kindly, "that since the District Attorney has matters in his own hands, you had better go with him and witness the search. If you do not object, we shall be glad to accompany you. Our presence may prove helpful later."

Because his mind ran forward in an absorbed attempt to forecast and forestall the probable developments from the impending discovery of the clue against Rollie, the minister still paused, until his silence became as conspicuous as his inaction.

"Oh, yes, yes," he exclaimed, suddenly aware of the waiting group about him. "Yes, by all means, go with me. What we must face, we must face," he concluded desperately, with an uneasy inner intimation that he was saying perhaps the wrong thing. Yet with the vision of Mrs. Burbeck's saintly, smiling face before him, Hampstead, usually so calm and self-controlled, had little care what he said or how he said it so long as his mind was busy with some plan to fend off this frightful blow from her.

Mr. Wadham was a man of mature years and fatherly ways. He took the young minister's arm affectionately in his, and urged him forward in the wake of Searle, who had already moved out into the wide hall accompanied by the two plain-clothes men. Hayes and Wilson, still sympathetic, but no longer quite comprehending the undue excitement of the young divine in whose integrity their confidence was so great, fell in behind.

Once before the custodian of the vault, another evidence of the thoughtfulness of Searle appeared. John R. Costello, attorney of the bank, was conveniently on hand to read the warrant of the court and to instruct the custodian of the vault upon whom it was served that it was in proper form and must be obeyed.

Because the number of witnesses was too large to be accommodated in the rooms provided for customers, the inspection of the minister's box was made upon a table in the vault room itself. In the group of onlookers, Hampstead, because of his commanding figure, his remarkable face, and his very natural interest in the proceedings, was the most conspicuous presence. As naturally as all eyes centered on the box, just so they kept breaking away at intervals to scan the face of the big man who stood before them in an attitude of embarrassed helplessness. He was obviously making a considerable effort to control himself. Only Searle was sure that he understood this. But at the same moment, two of the bondsmen, the kind-hearted Wadham and the shrewd, practical Wilson, appeared to observe this attitude and to detect its significance. They exchanged questioning glances, and were further mystified when for a single moment a look of confident reassurance flickered like the play of a sunbeam upon the face of the minister.

That was in his one selfish moment, when he recalled how the search of the box, after all these excessive precautions of the District Attorney's office, could only recoil upon their case like a boomerang; but his countenance shaded again to an expression of anxious helplessness as Searle paused dramatically a moment with his hand upon the box. Then the hand lifted the hinged cover, revealing the contents.

As if from a nervous eagerness to come quickly at the object of his search, the Assistant District Attorney turned the box upside down and emptied its contents on the table; and yet, when this was done, nothing appeared but papers.

Searle attempted to open none of them. Proceeding with deliberate care, as if to vindicate himself in the eyes of the bondsmen from the suspicion of the minister that he might be on a "fishing expedition", he merely took up each piece singly and precisely, felt it over with his long, thin fingers and laid it by, until at length but two envelopes remained. The first of these was long and empty looking and gave evidence that the flap had been rudely, if not hastily, torn open. Searle held it in his hand now.

Hampstead's heart stood still; he knew that this must be the envelope which had contained the Wadham currency, hence between this attorney's thumb and forefinger, screened by one thickness of paper, lay the card that was the clue to Rollie Burbeck's crime. But the moment of suspense passed.

Submitting it to the same inquisitive finger manipulation as the others, yet not looking within it nor turning it over to read what might be written on the face, Searle laid the Wadham envelope on the pile of discards.

"Thank God," gulped Hampstead, yet with utterance so inchoate that Hayes, the third bondsman, standing nearest, did not catch the words, but a few minutes later, discussing the matter with Wilson, said: "I heard the apprehensive rattle in his throat just before Searle came to that last envelope."

But in the meantime, Hampstead was asking himself suspiciously what was this last envelope? He thought he knew by heart every separate document that was in the box, and he could not recall what this might be.

"You must be convinced by now," argued Searle, as if deliberately heightening the suspense, while he turned a straight glance upon the minister, "that I had no object in inspecting the contents of this box except to search for the diamonds."

"And you have not found them!"

This was obviously the remark which should have come in triumphant, challenging tones from the minister. As a matter of fact, it came quietly, and with a sigh of relief, from Silas Wadham.

The minister did not speak at all, did not even raise his eyes to meet the glance of Searle. His gaze was fixed as his mind was fascinated by the mystery of the last lone envelope.

"Not yet," replied Searle significantly to Wadham's interjection, but instead of disappointment there was that quality in his tones which heightens and intensifies expectancy. At the same time he took up the envelope by one end, but, under the weight of something within, the paper bent surprisingly in the middle and the lower end swung pendant and baglike, accompanied by the slightest perceptible metallic sound. Every member of the group of witnesses leaned forward with an involuntary start. Triumph flooded the face of Searle. With his left hand he seized the heavy, bag-like end and raised it while the envelope was turned in his fingers bringing into view the printing in the corner.

"This envelope bears the name and address of the Reverend John Hampstead," he announced in formal tones. "I now open it in your presence."

Nervously the Assistant District Attorney tore off the end of the envelope, squinted within, and exclaimed: "It contains—" His voice halted for an instant while he dramatically tipped the envelope toward the table and a string of fire flowed out and lay quivering before the eyes of all—"the Dounay diamonds!"

The jewels, trembling under the impulse of the movement by which they had been deposited upon the table, sparkled as if with resentful brilliance at having been thus darkly immured, and for an appreciable interval they compelled the attention of all; then every eye was turned upon the accused minister.

But these inquisitorial glances came too late. Amazement, bewilderment, a sense of outrage, and hot indignation, had been reeled across the screen of his features; but that was in the ticking seconds while the gaze of all was on the envelope and then upon the diamonds and their aggressive scintillations. Now the curious eyes rested upon a man who, after a moment in which to think, had visioned himself surrounded and overwhelmed by circumstances that were absolutely damning,—his own conduct of the last few minutes the most damning of all. His face was as white as the paper of the envelope which contained the irrefutable evidence. His eyes revolved uncertainly and then went questioningly from face to face in the circle round him as if for confirmation of the conclusion to which the logic of his own mind forced him irresistibly. In not one was that confirmation wanting.

"But," he protested wildly, and then his glance broke down. "It has come," he murmured hoarsely, covering his face with his hands. "It has come!"

His cross had come!

Some odd, disastrous chain of sequences which he had not yet had time to reason out had fixed this crime on him. By another equally disastrous chain of sequences, he must bear its guilt or be false to his confessor's vow. Especially must he bear it, if he would shield that doting mother who trusted him and loved him.

As if to hold himself together, he clasped his arms before him, and his chin sunk forward on his breast. As if to accustom his mind to the new view from which he must look out upon the world, he closed his eyes. The heaving chest, the tense jaws, the quivering lips, and the mop of hair that fell disheveled round his temples, all combined to make up the convincing picture of a strong man breaking.

Not one of those present, crass or sympathetic, but felt himself the witness to a tragedy in which a man of noble aspirations had been overtaken and hopelessly crushed by an ingrained weakness which had expressed itself in sordid crime.

Even the hard face of Searle softened. With the diamonds gleaming where they lay, he began mechanically to replace the contents of the box. But at the first sound of rustling papers, the minister appeared to rouse again. He had stood all alone. No one had touched him. No one had addressed him. The most indifferent in this circle were stricken dumb by the spectacle of his fall, while his friends were almost as much appalled and dazed as he himself appeared to be.

"I suppose," he said with melancholy interest, at the same time moving round the table to the box, "that I may take it now."

"Certainly, Doctor," replied Searle suavely, yielding his place. Nevertheless, there was a slight expression of surprise upon his face, as upon those of the others, at the minister's sudden revival of concern in what must now be an utterly trifling detail so far as his own future went. Hampstead appeared to perceive this.

"There are sacred responsibilities here," he explained gravely, with a halting utterance that proclaimed the deeps that heaved within him; "which, strange as it may seem to you gentlemen, even at such an hour I would not like to forget."

Taking up a handful of the papers, he ran them through his fingers, his eye pausing for a moment to scan each one of them, and his expression kindling with first one memory and then another, as if he found a mournful satisfaction in recalling past days when many a man and woman had found peace for their souls in making him the sharer in their heart-burdens,—days which every member of that little circle felt instinctively were now gone forever.

Last of all his eye checked itself upon the envelope marked "Wadham Currency." Allowing the other papers to slip back to their place in the box the minister turned his glance into the open side of this remaining envelope. It was empty, save for a card tucked in the corner.

"This thing appears to have served its purpose," he commented absently, as if talking to himself. Then casually he tore the envelope across, and then again and again; finer and finer; yet not so fine as to excite suspicion. Looking for a wastebasket and finding none, he was about to drop the fragments in his coat pocket.

"I will take them," said the vault custodian, holding out his hand. To it the minister unhesitatingly committed the shredded envelope and card which contained the only documentary clue to any other person than himself as the thief of the Dounay diamonds. A few minutes later, this clue was in the wastebasket outside. The next morning it was in the furnace.

The group in the vault room broke away with dispirited slowness, as mourners turn from the freshly heaped earth. Behind all the minister lingered, as if unwilling to leave the presence of his dead reputation.

But the man's appearance somewhat belied his mood. He was thinking swiftly. This was no uncommon plot which had overtaken him. It was conceived in craft and laid with power to kill. The diabolical cunning of the scheme was that it forced him to be silent or to be a traitor. The indications were that he had been betrayed outrageously; but he did not know this positively, therefore he could venture no defense at all against this black array of circumstances. It might be only some terrible mistake, and for him to venture more now than the most general denial might bring about the very calamities he was trying to avert. He dared not even tell the truth: that he did not know the diamonds were in the box. Especially, he dared not say that he did not put them there.

For the first time an emotion like fear entered his soul, but it passed the moment the priestly ardor in him saw which way his duty lay. If Rollie had grossly sold him into the power of the actress at the price of his own escape, he felt more sorry for the poor wretch than before. He was glad that he had destroyed the I.O.U., discovery of which might have incriminated the young man helplessly, and he resolved to continue upon his mission as a saviour, even though he himself were lost. It suddenly occurred to him with doubling force that this was what it meant to be a saviour.

With this conviction firmly in his mind, Hampstead turned to Wilson, Wadham, and Hayes, who had been waiting in considerate silence, and led the way upward to the dimly lighted lobby of the bank, feeling himself grow stronger with every step he mounted; for the maze of complexities in which he found himself had quickly reduced itself to the simple duty of being true to trust. Eternal Loyalty was again to be the price of success.

As his friends gathered about him on the upper floor for a word of conference, they were astonished at the change in his expression. It was calm and even confident; while a kind of spiritual radiance suffused his features.

"My friends," the minister began in an even voice, that nevertheless was full of the echo of deep feeling, "I can offer you no explanation of the scene to which you have just been witnesses. It is almost inevitable that you should think me guilty or criminally culpable. I am neither!" The affirmation was made as if to acquit his conscience, rather than as if to be expected to be believed.

"But," and his utterance became incisive, "there is nothing to that effect which can be said now."

"Something had better be said now," blurted out the practical Wilson flatly, "or this story in the morning papers will damn you as black as tar."

"Not one word," declared the minister with quiet emphasis, "can be spoken now!"

In Hampstead's bearing there was a notable return of that subtle power of man mastery which had been so important an element in his success. Before this even the aggressive, outspoken Wilson was silent; but the three men stood regarding John with an air at once sympathetic and doubtful. They were also expectant, for it was evident from the minister's manner that he was deliberating whether he might not take them at least a little way into his confidence.

"Only this much I can indicate," he volunteered presently. "A part of what has happened I understand very clearly. A part I do not understand at all. In the meantime, some one, but not myself, is in jeopardy. Until the confusion is cleared, or until I can see better what to do than I see now, I can do nothing but rest under the circumstances which you have seen enmesh me to-night. Of course, it is impossible that such a monstrous injustice can long continue. I hold the power to clear myself instantly, but it is a power I cannot use without violating the most sacred obligation a minister can assume. I will not violate it. I must insist that not one single word which I have just hinted to you be given to the public. Silence, absolute and unwavering silence, is the course which is forced upon me and upon every friend who would be true to me, as I shall seek to be true to my duty."

The three friends heard this declaration rather helplessly. In the presence of such a lofty spirit of self-immolation, what were mere men like themselves to say, or do? Obviously nothing, except to look the reverence and wonder which they felt and to bow tacitly to his will. Hampstead knew instinctively and without one word of assurance that these men, at first overwhelmingly convinced of his guilt by what they had seen, and then bewildered by his manner, now believed in him absolutely. It put him at ease with them and gave him assurance to add:

"I know that not one of you is a man to desert a friend in the hour of his extremity, and no matter what happens I believe your faith in me will not falter. You will understand my wish to thank you for what you have done and may do, and to say good-by for to-night. My burning desire now is to get by myself and try to comprehend what has happened and what may yet happen before this miserable business is concluded."

Cordially taking the hand of each, while the men one after another responded with fervent expressions of faith and confidence, the minister turned quickly upon his heel, crossed the street, and leaped lightly upon a passing car.

Silence! Silence! Unwavering silence! The car wheels seemed to beat this injunction up to him with every revolution. Silence for the sake of others, some of whom were supremely worthy, one at least of whom might be wretchedly unworthy! Above all, silence for the sake of his vow as a vicar of Christ on earth. What was it to be a Christian if not to be a miniature Christ,—a poor, stumbling, tottering, stained and far-off pattern of the mighty archetype of human goodness and perfection? According to his strength, he, John Hampstead, was to be permitted to suffer as a saviour of a very small part of mankind and in a very temporary and no doubt in a very inadequate way, the virtue of which should lie in the fact that it pointed beyond himself to the one saviour who was supremely able. He, too, must be "dumb before his shearers", not stubbornly, not guiltily, and not spectacularly, but faithfully and for a worth-while purpose,—the saving of a man.

For a change had come swiftly in the relative importance of the motives which determined his course. With the actual coming of his cross, he had caught a loftier vision. It was not to save the few remaining weeks or months or years of the life of a saintly and beautiful woman that he was to stand silent even to trial, conviction, and disgrace. It was to save the soul of a man, a wretched, vain, ornamental and unutilitarian sort of person, but none the less unusually gifted in many of his faculties, perhaps wanting only an experience like this to precipitate the better elements in his nature into the foundation of such a character as his mother believed him to possess.

This change of emphasis strengthened Hampstead enormously. It gave him calm and resolution, increasing self-control and fortitude, a dignity of bearing that promised at least to remain unbroken, and a sense of the presence of the Presence which it seemed could not depart from him.

When John reached home, he found Rose, Dick, and Tayna waiting anxiously. A sight of his face, with the new strength and dignity upon it, allayed their apprehension, but the solemnity of manner in which he gathered them about him in the study roused their fears again. Briefly he related how the diamonds had been discovered in his safe deposit vault. Sternly but kindly he repressed the hot outburst of Dick; sympathetically he tried to stem the tears of Tayna, but before the pale face and the dry, fixed eyes of Rose he stood a moment, mute and hesitant, then said with tender brotherliness:

"Old girl, in the silence of waiting for my vindication, it is going to be easier for you and the children to trust me than for others. But even for you it will be hard. Others can withdraw from me, can wash their hands of me; and they may do it. You cannot, and would not if you could."

Rose clasped her brother's hand in silent assurance; but Hampstead went on with saddened voice to portray what was to be expected.

"You will all have to bear the shame with me. In fact, my shame will be yours. You, Rose, will be pointed out upon the street as my sister. Tayna, at school to-morrow, may encounter fewer smiles and some eyes that refuse to meet hers. Dick will have some hurts to bear among his fellows, for he has been loyally and perhaps boastfully proud of me. I have only this to ask, that you will each walk with head up and unafraid, with no attempt at apology nor justification, and with no unkind word for those who in act or judgment seem unkind to me."

The feeling that they were to be honored with bearing a part of the burden of the big man whom they loved so deeply stirred the emotions of the little group almost beyond control. Dick moved first, clutching his uncle's hand.

"You bet your life!" he blurted, then turned and bolted from the room. Tayna next flung her arms about her uncle's neck and wet his cheek with scalding tears, then dashed away after Dick. Last of all, Rose stood with her hands upon his shoulders. She was taller for a woman than he for a man, and could look almost level into his eyes.

"My brother!" she said significantly. "My strong, noble, innocent"—and then a gleam of light shot into her eyes as she added—"my triumphant brother!"

"My bravest, truest of sisters!" The big man breathed softly, and drawing the woman to him imprinted that kiss upon the forehead which, seldom bestowed, marked when given his genuine tribute of respect and affection to the woman who, older than himself by ten years, had been the mother to his orphaned youth and had created the obligation which, uncharged, he none the less acknowledged and had striven to repay by a life of conscientious devotion to her and to her children.

The door closed after her "Good night", and John stood alone glancing reflectively about the long, book-lined room. Here many of his greatest experiences had come to him. Here he had caught the far-off kindling visions of that rarely human Galilean, with his rarely human group about him, trudging over the hills, sitting by the side of the sea, teaching, healing, helping. Here he had caught the vision of himself following, afar off, two thousand years behind, but following—teaching, healing, helping—in His name.

The telephone rang, its sharp, metallic jingle shocking the very atmosphere into apprehensive tremors. Yet instantly recalled to himself and to the new height on which he stood, Hampstead lifted the receiver with a firm hand and replied in an even, measured voice: "The Sentinel?—Yes—Yes—No—There is nothing to say—Absolutely!—I do."

The receiver was hung up. The only change in Hampstead's voice from the beginning to the end of this conversation, the larger part of which had taken place upon the other end of the line, was a deepening gravity of utterance. In a few moments the 'phone rang again. It was The Press. The papers all had the story now. The Oakland offices of the San Francisco papers were also clamoring. Each wanted to know what the minister had to say to the damning discovery of the diamonds in his box.

For them all Hampstead had the same answer: "I have nothing to say—yet." Some of the inquisitors cleverly attempted to draw the clergyman out by suggesting that there was plenty of opportunity for a countercharge that the diamonds had been planted in his box, since it was improbable in the last degree that a man of ordinary intelligence would conceal stolen diamonds in a safe deposit box held in his own name, the key to which he carried in his own pocket; but the self-controlled man at the other end of the telephone fell into no such trap. To direct attention to an inquiry as to who had visited his vault, or might have visited it, during the time since the diamonds were stolen was the last thing the minister would do. Already he had reasoned that the vault custodian on duty in the morning, knowing that Hampstead had not been to the vault during the day, but that Assistant Cashier Burbeck had, would do some excogitating upon his own account; but the minister reflected that this would not be dangerous, since the custodian, sharing in the very great confidence which Rollie enjoyed, would conclude that this young man had been made the innocent messenger for depositing the diamonds in the vault, and for the sake of unpleasant consequences which might result to the bank, would no doubt keep his mouth tightly shut.

The last call of all came from Haggard, whose city editor had just told him that the minister declined any sort of an explanation. Haggard was managing editor of The Press and Hampstead's true friend.

"Do you know what this does to your friends?" demanded Haggard passionately. "It makes them as dumb as you are. I know you; you've got something up your sleeve. But this case isn't going to be tried in the courts. It's being tried in the newspapers right now. Once the court of public opinion goes against you, it's hard to get a reversal. And it's going against you from the minute this story gets before the public—our version of it even—for we have got to print the news, you know. We've never had bigger."

Some sort of a protest gurgled from Hampstead's lips.

"Oh," broke out Haggard still more impatiently, "I think the majority have too much sense to believe you're a common thief; but they're going to be convinced you're a damned fool. A public man had better be found guilty of being a thief than an ass, any day. Now, what can I say?"

"I am very sorry," replied Hampstead in a patient voice, "but you can say nothing—absolutely nothing."

CHAPTER XXXI

A MISADVENTURE

Counting back from the scene in the vault room of the Amalgamated National, which took place at about nine-thirty, it was five and one-half hours to the time when Marien Dounay and Rollie Burbeck had steamed out with Mrs. Harrington upon her luxurious launch, the Black Swan, which was so commodious and powerful that it just escaped being a sea-going yacht.

But now, after the lapse of this five and one-half hours, neither Marien nor Rollie had returned, and only one of them had an inkling of what might have been happening in their absence. Information from the Harrington residence that the Black Swan would return to the pier about ten-thirty, caused a group of hopeful young men from the newspaper offices to take up their station on the yacht pier slightly in advance of that hour. But their wait was long, so long in fact that one by one they gave up their vigil and returned to their respective offices with no answer as yet to the burning question of what had led Miss Dounay to suspect that her diamonds were in the minister's safe deposit vault. But the distress and disappointment of the reporters was nothing like so great as the distress and disappointment upon the Black Swan, although for a very different reason.

The evening with Mrs. Harrington and her guests had begun pleasantly enough. The party itself was a jolly one, and so far as might be judged from outward appearances, Miss Marien Dounay was quite the jolliest of all; excepting perhaps Mrs. Harrington herself who was elated over the unexpected appearance of the actress; and Rollie, over its effect in immediately restoring him to the lost favor of his hostess. As many times as it was demanded, Miss Dounay told and retold the story of the loss of her jewels. She was the recipient of much sympathy and of many compliments because of the admirable fortitude with which she endured her loss.

Rollie thought Miss Dounay appeared able to dispense with the sympathy, but perceived that she greatly enjoyed the compliments. That she should keep the company in ignorance that her diamonds were to be recovered and continue to enact the rôle of the heroine who had been cruelly robbed of her chief possession, did not even surprise him. It was her affair entirely since she had bound him to secrecy, and whatever the motive, in the present state of his nerves, he was exceedingly grateful for it; having meantime not a doubt that the disclosure would be made ultimately in a manner which would permit the actress to gratify to the full her childish love of theatrical sensation.

The cruise began with a run far up San Pablo Bay toward Carquinez Straits, followed by a straightaway drive out through the Golden Gate to watch the sun sink between the horns of the Farallones; but here the heavy swells made the ladies gasp and clamor for a return to the shelter of the Bay. Re-entering the Gate as night fell, there was good fun in playing hide-and-seek from searchlight practice of the forts on either side the famous tideway, and some mischievous satisfaction in lounging in the track of the floundering, pounding ferryboats, and getting vigorously whistled out of the way. It was even enjoyable to grow sentimental over the phosphorescent glow of the waves in the wake or the play of the moonbeams on the bone-white crest at the bow. But after an hour or so of this, when it would seem that all of these things together with the tonic of the fresh salt breeze had made everybody wolfishly hungry, Mrs. Harrington's butler, expertly assisted, opened great hampers of eatables and drinkables, and began to serve them in the cabin which would have been rather spacious if the crowd had not been so large.

"Calmer water, James, while supper is being served!" Mrs. Harrington had ordered with a peace-be-still air.

James communicated the order to the captain, who understood very well that Mrs. Harrington was a lady to be obeyed. But it happened that there was a very fresh breeze on the Bay that night, and that a swell which was a kind of left-over from a gale outside two days before was still sloshing about inside, so that "calmer water" was not just the easiest thing to find, though the captain looked for it hard.

"Calmer water, James, I said!" Mrs. Harrington directed reprovingly, after an interval of watchful impatience, accompanying the observation by a look that shot barbs into the eye of the butler. A close observer would have noticed—and James was a close observer of his mistress—that Mrs. Harrington's neck swelled slightly, and that a flush began to mount upon her cheeks.

James knew this pouter-pigeon swelling well and its significance. Mrs. Harrington must now be obeyed. Calmer water had to be had, if it had to be made.

"Back of Yerba Buena, it is calmer," the lady concluded, with an increase of acerbity.

James lost no time in conveying this second command and a description of its accompanying signal, to the captain.

"'Behind the Goat,' she said," James concluded.

Now this island which humps like a camel in the middle of the San Francisco Bay is known to the esthetics as Yerba Buena, but to folks and to mariners it is Goat Island. James was folks; the captain was a mariner. Mrs. Harrington might have been esthetic.

"She draws too much to go nosin' round in there," replied the captain reluctantly, and explained his reluctance with a mixture of emphasis and the picturesque, by adding, "Behind the Goat it's shoal from hell to breakfast."

"She said it," replied James truculently; and stood by to see the helm shift.

"In she goes then, dod gast her!" muttered the captain.

"So much calmer in here under the sheltering lee of Yerba Buena," chirped Miss Gwendolyn Briggs, another quarter of an hour later.

"Why, to be sure," assented the hostess, as with a provident air she surveyed her contented and consuming guests who were ranged like a circling frieze upon the seat of Pullman plush which ran round the luxurious cabin, with James and his two assistants serving from the long table in the center.

It has been hinted that Mrs. Harrington was inclined to stoutness. She was also inclined to Russian caviar. Having seen her guests abundantly supplied, she lifted to her lips a triangle of toast, thickly spread with the Romanof confection. James stood before her, supporting a plate upon which were more triangles of toast and more caviar in a frilled and corrugated carton.

But quite abruptly Mrs. Harrington, who was proper as well as expert in all her food-taking manners, did an unaccountable thing. She turned the toast sidewise and smeared the caviar across her wide cheek almost from the corner of her mouth to her ear. At the same moment James himself did an even more unaccountable thing. He lurched forward, decorated his mistress's shoulders with the triangles of toast, like a new form of epaulette and upset the carton of caviar upon her expansive bosom, where the dark, oleaginous mass clung helplessly, quivered hesitantly, and then began to roll away in tiny, black spheres and to send out trickling exploratory streams, the general tendency of which was downward.

Nor was Mrs. Harrington alone in this sudden eccentricity of deportment. Over on the right Major Hassler, florid of person and extremely dignified of manner, was filling the wine glass of Mrs. Marston Conant, when abruptly he moved the mouth of the bottle a full twelve inches and began to pour its contents in a frothy gurgling stream down the back of the withered neck of John Ray, a rich, irascible, slightly deaf, and sinfully rich bachelor, who at the moment had leaned very low and forward to catch a remark that the lady next beyond was making. As if not content with the ruin thus wrought, Major Hassler next swept the bottle in a dizzy, cascading circle round him, sprinkling every toilet within a radius of three yards, and after dropping the bottle and flourishing his arms wildly, ended by plunging both hands to the bottom of the huge bowl of punch on the end of the table nearest him.

The only palliating feature of these amazing performances of Major Hassler, of James, and of Mrs. Harrington, was that nearly everybody else was executing the same sort of scrambling, lurching, colliding, capsizing, and smearing manoeuvres upon their own account. For a moment everybody glared at everybody else accusingly, and then Ernest Cartwright, sitting on the floor where he had been hurled, offered an interpretation of the phenomena.

"We struck something!" he suggested brightly.

"By Gad!" declared Major Hassler with sudden conviction, as he straightened up and viewed his dripping hands and cuffs with an expression quite indescribable. "By Gad! That's just what I think!"

"James!" murmured a voice almost entirely smothered by rage.

James, despite the horrible fear in his soul, dared to turn his gaze upon his mistress, when suddenly a spasm of pain crossed the lady's face.

"Oh!" she gasped. "Oh, my heart!" Wrath had given way to fright, and the hue of wrath to pallor.

In the meantime, the Black Swan was standing very still, as still as if on land,—which to be exact was where she was. From without came the sound of waves slapping idly against her sides, and then she shivered while the screws were reversed and churned desperately. From end to end of the cabin there were "Ohs" and "Ahs," and shrieks of dismay, with short ejaculations, as the guests struggled to their feet and stood to view the ruin which the sudden stoppage of the craft had wrought upon toilets, dispositions, and the atmosphere of Mrs. Harrington's happy party.

The next half hour, to employ a marine phrase, was devoted to salvage of one sort and another. One thing became speedily clear. The Black Swan had her nose fast in most tenacious clay. No amount of churning of the screw could drag her off. And no amount of tooting of whistles brought any sort of craft to her assistance. She was stuck there till the tide should take her off. The tide was running out. By rough calculation, it would be eight hours till it came back strong enough to lift up her stern and rock her nose loose.

It was an unpleasant prospect.

With Mrs. Harrington sitting propped and pale in the end of the cabin, her guests tried to cheer her by making light of their plight and the prospect; but as the waters slipped out and out from under the Black Swan, till she lay on the bottom with a drunken list, and the hours crept along with dreary slowness through the tiresome night, one disposition after another succumbed to the inevitable and became cattish or bearish, according to sex. But the very first disposition of all to go permanently bad was that of Marien Dounay. Young Burbeck thought he understood to the full her capacity to be disagreeable, but learned in the first hour that this was a ridiculously mistaken assumption.

Nor could any mere petulance on account of weariness or cramped quarters among people who under these circumstances speedily became a bore to themselves and to each other, account for her behavior. Never had Rollie seen so many manifestations of her feline restlessness, or her wiry endurance. When other women had sunk exhausted to sleep upon a cushion in a corner, or upon the shoulders of an escort who obligingly supported the fair head with his own weary body, Miss Dounay sat bolt and desperate, staring at the myriad shoreward lights as if they held some secret her wilful eyes would yet bore out of them.

Though Rollie loyally tried, as endurance would permit, to watch with Marien through the night, sustaining snubs and shafts with humble patience and venturing an occasional dismal attempt at cheer, the first sign of relaxation in Miss Dounay's mood was vouchsafed not to him but to François.

This was when at eight o'clock the next morning, after toiling painfully up the steps at the landing pier, her eyes fell upon the huge black limousine, with the faithful chauffeur, his arms folded upon the wheel, his head leaning forward upon them, sound asleep. He had been there since ten-thirty of the night before. Other chauffeurs had waited and fumed, had sputtered to and fro in joy-riding intervals, and had gone home; but not François. A smile of pride and satisfaction played across Miss Dounay's face at this exhibition of faithfulness,—and especially in the presence of this jaded, dispirited crowd.

"François," Miss Dounay exclaimed, prodding his elbow until his head rolled sleepily into wakefulness, "I could kiss you!"

However, she did not. Rollie opened the door, Miss Dounay stepped back, motioned into the comfortable depths Mrs. Harrington and as many other of the ladies as the car would accommodate, and was whirled away.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE COWARD AND HIS CONSCIENCE

On the theory that his duty as an escort still survived, Rollie was given a seat upon the limousine beside François; but at the door of the St. Albans Miss Dounay dismissed him as curtly as if she had quite forgotten that he was now or ever of any importance to her.

While to escape a breakfast with that thistle-tempered lady on such a morning would, under ordinary conditions, have been a distinct relief, this morning it appealed to Rollie as merely palliative. It was a mercy, but no more. He did not expect to know one single sensation of real relief until he saw Miss Dounay holding her precious diamonds once more in her hands. It was his intention, after a hasty breakfast, to make the swiftest possible transit to the residence of the Reverend John Hampstead and there secure the loan of a certain key and rush back to the bank. Within, say, seven minutes thereafter, he anticipated that this taste of true relief would come to him.

It was twenty minutes past eight as he crossed the wide lobby of the hotel. His physical condition was far from enviable. He was clad in a baggy-elbowed, wretchedly wrinkled, and somewhat stained yachting suit. He had not slept since the night before, in which, he now recalled, he had not slept at all. During this extended period of wakefulness he had been upset and out of his orbit. Yet all this while the world had been rocking along, provokingly undisturbed by his troubles, and right now a big new day was hurrying on. The cars were banging outside, and the newsboys were making a devil of a racket about something, their cries filling the street and ringing vibrantly into the lobby from without. Everything was strident and noisy, jarring upon his nerves. His first instinct was a dive for the bar, but he stopped before the door was reached. He was on a new tack. He resolved not to drink to-day. He had signed no pledges; but he felt that a highball was not in keeping with what he proposed to do.

Instead he veered toward the grillroom and ordered a pot of hot, hot coffee with rolls. To fill the impatient interval between the order and the service, he snatched eagerly at the morning paper in the extended hand of a waiter. At the first glance his eyes dilated, and his lips parted.

When the coffee came, he was still absorbed. The dark liquid was cold before he swallowed it, mechanically, in great gulps. It was well the chair had arms, or his body might have fallen from it. His mind was reeling like a drunken thing as he tried to grasp the process by which a woman's malice had used him for a vicious assault upon the man who had saved him when he stood eye to eye with ruin.

Slowly Burbeck's muddled intelligence groped backward over the events of yesterday. What a fool, he! How clever, she! How demoniacally clever! No wonder she forgave him so lightly; no wonder she cooed so ecstatically once she found the diamonds were in the preacher's vault! No wonder she had made sure that he went upon the yachting party, even to the point of going herself. It was to keep him out of reach until her diabolical plot against Hampstead could take effect. And no wonder she sat bolt and staring at the shore lights all the long night through.

But why did she plot against Hampstead? What was between the clergyman and herself? Why did Hampstead not strike out boldly and clear himself at one stroke, by the mere opening of his lips? He not only had not defended himself, but the papers declared he had a guilty air, that he fought against the opening of the box, and bore himself in a manner that convinced even his bondsmen he was guilty.

But the newspaper chanced to relate as an interesting detail how the minister had quickly recovered his self-possession, to the extent of rearranging the contents of his box after their handling by Assistant District Attorney Searle, and that he had even casually destroyed one paper with the remark that it was something no longer to be preserved.

This almost accidental sentence gave Rollie the strangest feeling of all. He knew what it must have been that was destroyed,—the evidence of his own indebtedness, to explain which would inevitably lead to his exposure. This, too, accounted for the preacher's protest and his apparent guilty fear. He could not know the diamonds were in the box; he did know the I.O.U. was there. He had destroyed it at the very moment when the discovery of the diamonds must surely have convinced him that the culprit he was shielding had betrayed him like a Judas.

"And yet he stands pat!" breathed Rollie huskily, while the greatest emotion of human gratitude that his heart could hold swelled his breast almost to bursting.

"I didn't know they made a man that would stand the gaff like that," he confessed after a further reflective interval.

Burbeck's first instinct was to rush to the telephone and acquit himself in the minister's mind of all complicity in the plot; for inevitably Rollie thought first of himself. But thought for himself recalled the threat of Marien Dounay. How fiercely she had warned him that his secret was not his own, but hers! He grasped the significance of her threat now as she had shrewdly calculated that he would. Let him murmur a word, let him attempt, no matter how subtly or adroitly, to set in motion any plan that would loosen the tightening coils about John Hampstead, and this woman would turn her crazy vengeance on him, would fasten his crime upon him, would do a baser thing than that,—would make it appear that he had deliberately placed the diamonds in the minister's vault, thus causing her innocently to do him this grave injustice. Thus in his exposure he would not be contemplated with indulgent sadness as a gentleman weakling who had descended to vulgar crime to make good another crime as heinous; but, on the contrary, would be regarded hatefully, repulsively, with loathsome scorn and withering contempt, as a despicable ingrate base enough to shift his guilt to the shoulders of the one who had rescued him.

Before this prospect, fear paralyzed every other impulse of his heart, every faculty of his brain. His head was aching violently. He pressed his hands against his temples, and wondered how he could get quietly out of here and where he could fly.

A secluded room of this very hotel suggested the surest isolation. He got up-stairs to the writing room, where a hastily scrawled note to Parma, the cashier, made the night upon the Bay the excuse for his absence from the bank for the day. Another to his mother,—he dared not hear her voice telling him of what had befallen her beloved pastor,—that he was too weary even to come home and would sleep the day out in Oakland, leaving his exact whereabouts unknown to avoid the possibility of disturbance.

Mustering one final rally of his volitional powers, Rollo approached the desk and registered as some one not himself before the very eyes of the clerk, who knew him well and laughingly became accessory to the subterfuge.

Once within the privacy of his room, the impulse to telephone to John Hampstead and tell that distracted man a thing which he would be greatly desiring to know, came again to the young man; but in part exhaustion and in part cowardice led him to postpone that simple act till he had slept, rested, thought.

A few minutes later, with shades darkened and clothing half removed, he buried his feverish head among the pillows and sought to bury consciousness as well. But the latter attempt was a failure, for the young man found himself prodded into the extreme of wakefulness,—thinking, thinking, thinking, until he was all but mad. Out of all this thinking gradually emerged one solid, unshifting fact. This was the character of John Hampstead. He, Rollo Burbeck, might be a shriveling, paltering coward; Marien Dounay might be only a beautiful fiend; but John Hampstead was a strong, unwavering man. John Hampstead would stand firm!

Buoying his soul on this idea, Rollie dropped off to feverish slumber. But the sleeper awoke suddenly with one question hooking at his vitals. Was any man physically equal to such a strain? Was John Hampstead still standing firm like the huge human bulwark he had begun to seem?

Shrill cries floated upward from the street, sounding above the persistent whang of car wheels upon the rails. These were the voices of the newsboys crying the noon edition.

Rollie rose uncertainly and tottered to the telephone, where he asked that the latest papers be sent up to him, and awaited their coming in an ague of suspense and fear.

When they were received, he found little upon the front of either but the story of the minister's arrest for the theft of the diamonds and the finding of the jewels in his box, coupled with fresh emphasis upon his exhibition of the demeanor of a guilty man. It flowed up and down the chopped-off and sawed-out columns, liberally besprinkled with photographs of the chief actors in the drama, then turned upon the second page and spread itself riotously, in various types.

Through these paragraphs the mind of young Burbeck scrambled like a terrier digging for a rat, pawing his way desperately to make sure of the answer to his one, all-consuming question: Was the preacher still standing? The first paper declared accusingly that he was; that, like a guilty man taking advantage of technicalities, he refused to speak. The second paper affirmed the same, but with even greater emphasis, though without the meaner implication.

In the spread-out story there were set forth details and conjectures innumerable that would have interested and amazed Rollie, if his mind had been able to grasp them at all; but it was not. It fastened upon the one thing of ultimate significance in his present water-logged state. Hugging in his arms the papers which conveyed this supreme assurance to him, as if they had been the spar to which his soul was clinging, he rolled over upon the bed with a sigh of intense relief and sank instantly into long and unbroken sleep.

Hunger wakened him at eight in the evening; but instead of ringing for food, he asked for the evening papers. Again their message was reassuring. His nerves were stronger now; his soul was gaining the respite which it needed. He dispatched a messenger to his home for fresh linen and a business suit, turned on the water in the bath, arranged for the presence of a barber in his room in fifteen minutes, and the service of a hearty dinner in the same place in thirty.

The refreshment of invigorating sleep, plus the spectacle of John Hampstead, that Atlas of a man, standing rock-like beneath the world of another's burden, had inspired Rollie sufficiently to enable him to resume once more the pose of his presumed position in life. To be sure, he was still under the spell of his fear,—and could not see himself as yet doing one thing to weaken the pressure upon his benefactor.

For this dastardly inactivity he suffered a flood of self-reproaches, but stemmed them with reflections upon the irreproachable character of the minister, and his impregnable position in the community. He reflected how futile and puerile all the endeavors of the newspapers to involve this good man in scandal must prove. How ridiculous the idea that he could be a common thief! How suddenly the wide, sane public, after a day or two's debauch of excitement, would turn and bestow again their unwavering confidence upon this man and laurel his brow with fresh and more permanent expressions of their regard for his high character. Reflections like this, winged by his own inside knowledge of the true greatness of the victim, together with the soothing influence of a bath, the ministrations of a skilled barber, and the sedative effects of a good dinner, sent young Burbeck to his home somewhere about ten o'clock in the evening, to all appearances quite his usual, happy-looking self.

The telephone had apprised his mother of his coming, and she had remained up to meet him.

"Oh, my son!" she murmured happily, as he laid his smooth cheek against hers and mingled his wavy brown hair with the silvering threads of her own dark tresses.

The young man gave his mother a gentle pressure of his hands upon her shoulders, then turned his face and kissed her cheek, but ventured no word. A sense of blood guiltiness had come upon him at the contact of her presence.

"Of course you have seen what that woman and the papers are doing to Brother Hampstead," his mother observed sadly.

"Yes," replied the young man, in a tone as dejected as hers.

"They are tearing his reputation to pieces," the mother went on. "There is hardly a shred of it left now. Like vultures they are digging over every detail of his life and putting a sinister interpretation upon the most innocent things. The worst of it is that even our own people begin to turn against him. Some of the people for whom he has done the most and suffered the most are readiest with their tongues to blast his character. It is a sad commentary upon the way of the world."

"Still," urged Rollie, "the man is strong; his character is so upright; his purposes are so high and so unselfish that no permanent harm can come to him. His enemies must sooner or later be confuted, and he will emerge from all this pother—" Pother: it took great resolution for Rollie to force so large a fact into so small a word—"a bigger and a more influential man in the community, even a more useful one than before."

Mrs. Burbeck listened to this tribute from her beloved son to her beloved minister with a joy that was pathetic. She had never known him to speak so heartily, with such unreserved admiration before. It told her things about the character of her son she had hoped but had not known. Yet she felt herself compelled to disagree with her son's conclusions.

"That is where you are wrong, my boy," she said, again in tones of sadness. "The public mind is a strange consciousness. If it once gets a view of a man through the smoked glasses of prejudice, it seldom consents to look at him any other way. Remove to-morrow every vestige of evidence against Brother Hampstead, and, mark my words! the fickle public will begin to discover or invent new reasons why, once having hurled its idol down, it will not put him up again."

"You take it too seriously, mother," suggested Rollie half-heartedly, after a moment of silence.

"No, I do not," Mrs. Burbeck replied, shaking her head gravely. "The worst of it is the man's absolute silence. If he would only say something. There must be some sort of explanation. If he took the diamonds, there must have been some laudable reason. This morning there were literally tens of thousands of people hoping for such an explanation and ready to give to him the benefit of every doubt. There are fewer such to-night. There will be fewer still to-morrow.

"If somebody else stole them, and Brother Hampstead, to protect the thief, planned to hold them temporarily while immunity was gained for the coward, he must see now that he made a terrible mistake, that for once he has carried his extravagant leniency entirely too far. If this theory is correct, the thief must have fled beyond the very reach of the newspapers, or be insane, or a drug fiend, or something like that. I cannot conceive of any human being so base, or in a position so delicate that he would not instantly make a public confession to spare his benefactor."

Rollie had turned and was looking straight at his mother, almost reproachfully, certainly protestingly, at the torture she was causing him. She saw this strange look and stopped.

"Oh, my boy," she exclaimed. "You are so sympathetic. How proud, how selfishly happy it makes me to feel that nothing like this can ever come upon my son!"

But Rollie's eyes had shifted quickly to a picture on the opposite wall, and he braced himself desperately against these bomb-like assaults of his mother upon his position.

"Yes," he said after an interval, "it must be pretty hard on Hampstead." But though he made this remark seem natural, his brain was again reeling. With mighty effort he forced himself to give the conversation another turn by a question which had been fascinating him during the whole day.

"Tell me," he asked, "how is father taking it?"

"Very hardly," Mrs. Burbeck confessed. "You know your father: so proud, so exact and scrupulous in all his dealings, with his word better than the average man's bond, yet not lenient toward the man who errs. He thinks everybody good or bad, every soul white or black. When Brother Hampstead was prosecuting law-breakers in court, father was proud of him; but when he goes off helping jail-birds and fallen women, father is harsh and utterly unsympathetic.

"Last night when the first charge appeared, father was greatly incensed, because at last, he said, Brother Hampstead had done the thing he always feared, brought the church into a notoriety that was unpleasant. This morning, at the story of the diamonds in the vault, he was dumbfounded. To-night he talks of nothing but that, whatever the outcome, All People's shall clear its skirts of the unpleasantness by requesting Brother Hampstead's resignation."

"Resignation!" Rollie gasped. "Resignation—simply for doing his duty! Why," he burst out excitedly, "that would be treachery! It would be the act of Judas. Don't let father do it, mother," he pleaded. "Don't let him put me in that position!"

A wild look had come into the young man's face as he spoke.

"You? In what position?"

Mrs. Burbeck was surprised at the expression on her son's face.

For a moment Rollie floundered wildly.

"Why, you see—I—I believe in Hampstead. I—I have told the bank that he is all right, no matter what happens. I don't want my own father reading him out of the church, do I?"

Mrs. Burbeck's perplexity gave way to smiling comprehension, which was met by relief and some approach to composure upon the features of her son, who felt that he had escaped the eddy of an appalling danger.

"Naturally," replied Mrs. Burbeck soothingly. "What a loyal nature yours is! By the way, Rollie," and the force of a new idea energized her glance and tone; "it is only half-past ten. Wouldn't it be fine of you to just run over and give Brother Hampstead a pressure of the hand to-night, and tell him how loyally your heart is with him in this trying situation? It would mean so much to him coming from a strong, successful, young man of the world like you, whose position he must admire so much!"

Rollie's face went white, and his eyes roved despairingly. It must have been well for the mother's peace of mind, as it certainly was for his, that, having asked her question, instead of studying his face while she waited for the answer, she let her eyes fall to the seal ring she had given him upon his twenty-first birthday, and busied herself with studying out again the complexities of the monogram and holding off the hand itself to see how handsomely the ring adorned it.

"I think I'd rather not to-night, mother," Rollie replied, as if after a moment of deliberation. "This thing works me up terribly—you can see that—and I'm a bit short on sleep yet. If I went to see Brother Hampstead to-night, I'm sure I shouldn't sleep a wink afterward. Besides, my coming might alarm him. It might make him think his plight is worse than it is; it would be so unusual."

Again the mother-love surged above any other emotion. "You are right," she admitted, caressing his hand. "It was only an impulse of mine, anyway. You must be tired, poor boy."

"Pretty tired, mother," he confessed truthfully; then stooped and kissed her upon the cheek and seemed to leave the room naturally enough, although in his soul he knew that he fled from her presence like a criminal from his conscience.

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE BATTLE OF THE HEADLINES

Hampstead was determined not to show the white feather. The morning after the discovery of the diamonds in his box, he made the effort to go about his daily duties unconcernedly and even happily, with a smile of confidence upon his face. His bearing was to proclaim his innocence. But it would not work. Crowds gaped. Individuals stared. Reporters hounded. The very people who needed his help and had been accustomed to receive it gratefully, appeared to shrink from his presence. At the homes where he called, an atmosphere of restraint and artificiality was created. He tried to thaw this and failed dismally; it was evident that the recipients of his attentions also tried, but also failed, for all the while their doubts peeped out at him.

After half a day the minister gave up and sat at home—immured, besieged, impounded. He was like a man upon a rock isolated by a deluge, the waters rolling horizon-wide and surging higher with every edition of the newspapers.

Oh, those newspapers! John Hampstead had not realized before how much of modern existence is lived in the newspapers. So amazingly skillful were they in sweeping away his public standing that the process was actually interesting. He found himself absorbed by it, viewing it almost impersonally, like a mere spectator, moved by it, swayed to one side or the other, as the record seemed to run. The description of the scene in the vault room, even as it appeared unembellished in Haggard's paper, overwhelmed him.

"It is the manner of a thief hopelessly guilty," he confessed.

On the other hand, when Haggard's paper in an editorial asked argumentatively: "Why should this man steal? What need had he for money in large sums?" John's judgment approved the soundness of such a defense. "There were a score," affirmed the editorial, "perhaps a hundred men who had and would freely supply Doctor Hampstead with all the money necessary for the exigencies of the work to which he notoriously devoted all his time. As for his personal needs, the man lived simply. He had no wants beyond his income."

"True—perfectly true. A good point that," conceded Hampstead to himself.

But that evening one of the San Francisco papers reported that at about the time the diamonds were stolen, the Reverend Hampstead had approached various persons in Oakland with a view to borrowing a large sum of money without stating for what the money was required. The paper volunteered the conjecture that the minister, through speculation in stocks, had overdrawn some fund of which he was a trustee, and of which he was presently to be called upon to give an accounting; hence the desperate resort to the theft of the diamonds and the temporary holding of them in his vault, boldly counting on his own immunity from suspicion.

This conjecture was extremely damaging. It skillfully suggested a logical hypothesis upon which the minister could be assumed to be a thief; and so high had been the man's standing that some such hypothesis was necessary.

As Hampstead read this, he felt the viciousness of the thrust. It was false, but it had the color of an actual incident behind it. Some clerk, bookkeeper, or secretary to one of the men who had so promptly enabled him to meet Rollie's defalcation, seeing the comparatively large sum in cash passed to the hand of the minister, had done a little thinking at the time and when the arrest came had done a little talking.

Yet the morning papers of the next day had apparently forgotten this incident. They were off in full cry upon a much more dangerous trail by digging deeper into the relations between the minister and the actress. As if from hotel employees, or some one in Miss Dounay's service, one of them had elicited and put together a story of all the calls that Hampstead had made upon Miss Dounay in her hotel during the five weeks she had been at the St. Albans. This story made it appear that the minister had become infatuated with the actress, and that he had sought every means of spending time in her company.

It was skillfully revealed that Miss Dounay at first had been greatly attracted by the personality and the apparent sincerity of the clergyman; but as her social acquaintance in the city rapidly extended and the work upon her London production became more engrossing, she had less and less time for him, and was finally compelled to deny herself almost entirely to the divine's unwelcome attentions, notwithstanding which the clergyman still found means of forcing himself upon the actress. One such occasion, it appeared, had prevented the appearance of Miss Dounay at a dinner given by a very prominent society lady of the town, where the brilliant woman was to have been the guest of honor. Some one had even recalled that the minister was not an invited guest at the dinner during which the diamonds were stolen. He had presented himself, it seemed, after the affair was in progress and departed before its conclusion.

But it was left to one of the evening papers of this day to explode the climactic story of the series. The writers of the morning story had been careful to protect the conduct of Miss Dounay from injurious inference; but now the Evening Messenger went upon the streets with a story that left Miss Dounay's character to take care of itself, and purported boldly to defend the minister.

PREACHER NOT THIEF, boldly ventured the headlines. The report declared that an intimacy of long standing had existed between the minister and the actress. The public was reminded of what part of it had forgotten and the rest never knew, that John Hampstead had himself been an actor. The narrative told how the minister had made his professional debut in Los Angeles by carrying this same Marien Dounay in his arms in Quo Vadis, night after night, in scene after scene, during the run of the play; and hinted broadly of an attachment beginning then which had ripened quickly into something very powerful, so powerful, in fact, that when Hampstead was playing with the "People's", an obscure stock company in San Francisco, Miss Dounay had broken with Mowrey at the Grand Opera House, because he refused to have the awkward amateur in his company, and had herself gone out to the little theater in Hayes Valley and lent to its performance the glamour of her name and personality, merely to be near the idol upon whom her affections had fixed themselves so fiercely.

Actors now playing in San Francisco who had been members of the People's Stock at the time remembered that the couple succeeded but poorly in suppressing signs of their devotion to each other, and the stage manager, now retired, was able to recall how in the garden scene of East Lynne, Miss Dounay had deliberately changed the "business" between Hampstead and herself in order that she might receive a kiss upon the lips instead of upon the forehead as the script required.

This mosaic of truth and falsehood related with gustatory detail a violent quarrel between the two which occurred one night in a restaurant prominent in the night life of the old city, the result of which was that Miss Dounay cast off her domineering and self-willed lover entirely.

"After a few weeks," the article observed soberly, "the broken-hearted lover surprised his friends by renouncing the stage and entering upon the life of the ministry as a solace to his wounded affections."

In support of this, it was pointed out that the minister had never married nor been known to show the slightest tendency toward gallantries in his necessarily wide association with women.

The glittering achievement of vindication was next attempted by the Messenger's story. This admittedly was theory, but it was set forth with confidence and particularity, as follows:

"The return of the actress, in the prime of her beauty and at the very zenith of her career, upon a visit to California, which had been her childhood home, not unnaturally led to a revival of the old passion. For a time the two were running about together as happy as cooing doves. Then a clash came. This was over the question of the harmonizing of the two careers. Obviously, Miss Dounay could not be expected to give up hers, and the minister was now so devoted to his own work that he found himself unwilling to make the required concession upon his part.

"A serious disagreement resulted. The actress was a woman of high temper. It had been the custom to deposit her diamonds in the minister's box as a matter of protection. On the night of the party, she had committed them to him, as usual. But the next morning, angered over the clergyman's failure to keep an appointment with her, the actress, in a moment of reckless passion, had charged him with stealing them. Under the circumstances, Hampstead, as a chivalrous man, declined to speak, knowing full well that sooner or later the woman's passion would relent, and she would release him from the awkward position in which he stood."

There were holes in this story. At places it did not fit the facts; as for instance, the minor fact that by common agreement the minister did not leave the dinner party until considerably after twelve, consequently at a time when the bank vault was inaccessible. There was also the major fact that the theft of the diamonds was discovered and reported at two o'clock in the morning, and not the next day "after the minister's failure to keep an appointment with the actress had angered her."

But these trifling discrepancies were disregarded by the eager rewrite man, who threw this story together from the harvesting of half a dozen leg-weary reporters.

Nor did they matter greatly to Hampstead. He read the story with whitening lips. He recognized it as the sort of vindication that would ruin him. It made his position a thousand times more difficult. It was infinitely harder to keep silence when the very truth itself was blunderingly mixed to malign him.

Nor did the public mind the discrepancies greatly. The Messenger's story was a triumph of journalism. It was the most eagerly read, the most convincingly detailed explanation of what had occurred. The public absorbed it with a sense of relief that at last it had learned how such a man as John Hampstead could have fallen as he had. The story even excited a little sympathy for the minister by revealing the unexpected element of romance in his life. Nevertheless, its publication upon the evening of the third day after the minister's arrest battered away the last pretense of any considerable section of the popular mind that, whatever the outcome of his trial, Hampstead was any longer a man entitled to public confidence.

Flying rumor, published gossip, and vociferous assault upon one side, combined with guilty silence upon the other, had absolutely completed the work of destruction. The reputation of the pastor of All People's was hopelessly blasted. Even to the minister, sitting alone like a convict in his cell, this effect was clearly apparent. The question of whether he was a thief or not a thief had faded into the background of triviality. The issue was whether he, a trusted minister, while occupying his pulpit and bearing himself as a chaste and irreproachable servant of mankind, had yielded to an intrigue of the flesh. The indictment did not lie in definite specifications that could be refuted, but in inferences that were unescapable.

The riot of reckless gossip had made the preacher's honor common. Anything was believable. Each single incident became a convincing link in the chain of evidence that John Hampstead was an apostate to the creed and character he espoused.

The minister in his study, his desk and chair an island surrounded by a sea of rumpled newspapers, harried on every side by doubt and suspicion so aggressive that it almost forced him to doubt and suspect himself, laid his face upon his desk.

This was more than he had prayed for. This was no honored cross that he was asked to bear. It was a robe of shame to be put upon him publicly. To be sure, it was loose, ill-fitting, diaphanous, but none the less it was enveloping. It did not blot out, yet it ate like a splotch of acid.

But suddenly the man sat up, and for the first time since the startling disclosure in the vault room, a look of terror shot into his eyes, terror mixed with pain that was indescribable. It was a thought of the effect of this last story upon the mind of Bessie that had stabbed him. Bessie had grown wonderfully during these five years. She had completed four years at Stanford and one year of post-graduate work in the University of Chicago. To-morrow, if he had the date right, she would be receiving her degree. The beauty of her character and the beauty of her person had ripened together, until John's imagination could think of nothing so exquisite in all the universe as Bessie Mitchell. And after the degree and a summer in Europe, she was coming back to California and to him! Together they were going to enter upon a life and the making of a home that was to be rich in happiness for both of them, and as they fondly hoped, rich in happiness for all with whom they came in contact.

Reflecting that in this last week Bessie would be too busy to read the newspapers, John had chivalrously thought to tell her nothing of what was befalling him, that she might set out happily upon her European journey. But now had come this alleged vindication, which was the most terrible assault of all, with its disgusting insinuations. He felt instinctively that Bessie would see that story, because it was the one of all which she ought not to see. Seeing it, he assured himself, she would believe it, more fully than any one else would believe it. John knew that despite his own years of steadfast devotion and despite her own constant effort to do so, she had never quite wiped out the horrible suspicions engendered by his confession of the brief attachment for Miss Dounay. He suspected it was a thing no woman ever successfully wipes out. This damnable story would revive that suspicion convincingly. It was inevitable that Bessie should believe that Marien Dounay's presence had revived the old infatuation, and that he had yielded to its power.

This reflection left Hampstead with his lips pursed, his cheeks drawn, sitting bolt and rigid like a frozen man.

In this polar atmosphere the telephone tinkled. The minister answered it with wooden movements and a wooden voice: