"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."