"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."