But suddenly the man sat up, and for the first time since the startling disclosure in the vault room, a look of terror shot into his eyes, terror mixed with pain that was indescribable. It was a thought of the effect of this last story upon the mind of Bessie that had stabbed him. Bessie had grown wonderfully during these five years. She had completed four years at Stanford and one year of post-graduate work in the University of Chicago. To-morrow, if he had the date right, she would be receiving her degree. The beauty of her character and the beauty of her person had ripened together, until John's imagination could think of nothing so exquisite in all the universe as Bessie Mitchell. And after the degree and a summer in Europe, she was coming back to California and to him! Together they were going to enter upon a life and the making of a home that was to be rich in happiness for both of them, and as they fondly hoped, rich in happiness for all with whom they came in contact.
Reflecting that in this last week Bessie would be too busy to read the newspapers, John had chivalrously thought to tell her nothing of what was befalling him, that she might set out happily upon her European journey. But now had come this alleged vindication, which was the most terrible assault of all, with its disgusting insinuations. He felt instinctively that Bessie would see that story, because it was the one of all which she ought not to see. Seeing it, he assured himself, she would believe it, more fully than any one else would believe it. John knew that despite his own years of steadfast devotion and despite her own constant effort to do so, she had never quite wiped out the horrible suspicions engendered by his confession of the brief attachment for Miss Dounay. He suspected it was a thing no woman ever successfully wipes out. This damnable story would revive that suspicion convincingly. It was inevitable that Bessie should believe that Marien Dounay's presence had revived the old infatuation, and that he had yielded to its power.
This reflection left Hampstead with his lips pursed, his cheeks drawn, sitting bolt and rigid like a frozen man.
In this polar atmosphere the telephone tinkled. The minister answered it with wooden movements and a wooden voice:
"No, nothing to say—yet."
Always the "yet" was added. "Yet" meant the minister's hope for deliverance. The reporters who had heard that "yet" so many times in the three days began to find in it something pathetic and almost convincing. But though the minister had added it this last time from sheer force of habit, the hope had just departed from him. With his love-hope gone, there was nothing personally for which John Hampstead cared to ask the future. Time, for him, was at an end. He was not a being. He was an instrument.
But as if to remind him for what purpose he was an instrument, he had barely hung up the 'phone when there was a faint tap at the outer entrance of his study, followed at his word of invitation by the figure of a man who, with a furtive, backward glance as if afraid of the shadows beneath the palm trees, slipped quickly through the narrowest possible opening, closed the door and halted uncertainly, his eyes blinking at the light, his hands rubbing nervously one upon the other. The man was carefully dressed and tonsured. There was every evidence that to the world he was trying to be his old debonair self, but before the minister he stood abject and pitiable.
"Rollie!" exclaimed Doctor Hampstead, leaping up.
"She haunted me!" the conscience-stricken man faltered helplessly, sinking into a chair. "She threatened to denounce me right there in the bank, if I dared to communicate with you." Again there was that frightened look backward to the door.
An hour before, when the minister had not yet reasoned out the effect upon Bessie of this awful story of his alleged relations with the actress, he would have leaped upon Rollie vehemently, so anxious to know how the diamonds got into his safe-deposit box as almost to tear the story from the young man's throat.