Chapter IX: Part 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*CHAPTER XXIII*

*CAPRICIOUS WOMAN*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hampstead was still patient.

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

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

"Miss Dounay!" exclaimed the minister sharply.

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

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

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

Not unnaturally, the minister was angry.

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

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

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

"Francois!" he called sharply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*CHAPTER XXIV.*

*THE DAY OF ALL DAYS*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"DOUNAY DIAMONDS STOLEN" was its screaming message.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You saw the paper?" he began.

The minister nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It was on your mother's account?"

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

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

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

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

"You won't help me out?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And how much is your defalcation?"

"Forty-two hundred," sighed Rollie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Both are important," smiled the minister.

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

"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."