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.