charging him, the Reverend John Hampstead, with the theft of her diamond necklace, valued at twenty-two thousand dollars. There were a few lines of an interview with District Attorney Miller, in which that official stated that at first he had not regarded Miss Dounay's charges seriously, but that the actress was so emphatic in her demand for the warrant of arrest that he had not felt himself justified in refusing it. At the same time, the District Attorney expressed his personal belief in the innocence of the minister.
An attempt to serve the warrant immediately, the story said, had been frustrated by the temporary absence of the Reverend Hampstead in San Francisco upon one of his accustomed missions of mercy.
The article concluded with the statement that while it was generally known that Doctor Hampstead was one of Miss Dounay's guests on the night before, the report that he had been charged with the theft of the diamonds was everywhere received with a smile, and there was some harsh criticism of the District Attorney for issuing a complaint, the only effect of which must be to gratify the enemies of the clergyman, and to lessen his influence, thus hampering him in the good work he was doing in the community. This would be all to no purpose, since even a preliminary hearing must be sufficient to show that there was no evidence against him, and that the complaint itself was due to the extravagant suspicion of a highly nervous woman, laboring under great emotional strain.
That the actress herself, a woman of moods and caprices, had no adequate appreciation of the seriousness of her act in thus attacking the character of Doctor Hampstead was made evident to the reporters, when a telephone call to her apartments revealed that in the very hour when an endeavor to serve the warrant of arrest
