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.