Following his instincts rather than any rule of sense, Rollie hurried out upon the street, posted himself upon a conspicuous corner, and for several minutes indulged the wildly improbable hope that he might spy the minister passing in the throng. When a little reflection had convinced him that this was time wasted, he made a hasty inventory of near-by places where his benefactor might have gone, and even went so far as to hurriedly visit two of them, threading the tables of the Forum Café, where sometimes Hampstead ate his luncheon, and scanning the chairs in the St. Albans barber shop, where from time to time the dominie's tawny fleece was shorn.
But by this time a new probability forced itself into the distracted young man's consciousness. This was that the minister had gone to pay his sympathetic respects to Miss Dounay and condole with her over her loss. Rollie was so near the Dounay apartment that to go upstairs and inquire if the minister were there would have been easy, but the peculiar circumstances made it difficult. Indeed only to recall how near he was to that fearsome lair of the tigress threw him into cold shivers and made him fly to the safer vantage ground of the telephone upon his own desk at the bank. But even merely to inquire for the Reverend John Hampstead from there was hard. In his nervous state, depleted by gloomy forebodings and now unfortified by the possession of the diamonds, Rollie felt utterly unequal to even a long-distance contact with that high-powered personality. All the morning he had
