The robber started, his fierce eyes softened, his voice choked, and he gulped hard as he drew the back of his hand across his eyes.
"Aw, hell," he whimpered, "that ain't fair. If you're goin' to remind me of me poor old mo-mo-mother——"
But the one called Jake—the Claude Duval who had been prevented from a display of human sentiment, did not intend to be cheated. He thundered: "Stop it, Bill. You 'tend strictly to business, or I'll blow your mush-bowl off. You know your Maw died before you was born."
This reminder sobered the weeping thief at once, and he went back to work ruthlessly. "Oh, all right, Jake. Sorry, ma'am, but business is business." And he dumped Mrs. Temple's trinkets into the satchel. It was too much for the little old lady's little old husband. He fairly shrieked:
"Young man, you're a damned scoundrel, and the best argument I ever saw for hell-fire!"
Mrs. Temple's grief changed to horror at such a bolt from the blue: "Walter!" she gasped, "such language!"
But her husband answered in self-defence: "Even a minister has a right to swear once in his lifetime."
Mallory almost dropped in his tracks, and Marjorie keeled over on him, as he gasped: "Good Lord, Doctor Temple, you are a—a minister?"
"Yes, my boy," the old man confessed, glad that the robbers had relieved him of his guilty secret along with the rest of his private properties. Mallory looked at the collapsing Marjorie, and groaned: "And he was in the next berth all this time!"
The unmasking of the old fraud made a second sensation. Mrs. Fosdick called from far down the aisle: "Dr. Temple, you're not a detective?"