car steps. But the sub-head was more disturbing. "Hampstead's Premises Searched," it declared, the types seeming to scream the words exultantly.
Searched—and in his absence! This was outrageous! More; it was alarming, for there were papers in his study which he had good reason for keeping from the eyes of the police. Fortunately, however, the most important of these were in the safe deposit box. He felt deeply grateful now for this box, the key to which was in his pocket; and after a sympathetic thought for Rose, Dick, and Tayna, and the excited, bewildered state in which they must have received the officers, the clergyman turned his mind to a contemplation of this new account in detail, and thereby got his first real taste of what an unfriendly attitude on the part of a newspaper can make of the most innocent circumstances.
Up to now, the minister, his utterances, his denunciations, even his moral crusades, had been popular. The papers had put the most favorable construction upon all his acts. Their columns and their headlines had done him respect and honor. But now this paper had put every circumstance in the worst possible light. It cleverly touched up those scenes in the picture which looked incriminating and left the others unillumined, until one would never gather from the story that there was any reason to doubt the guilt or the guilty flight of the minister.
Hampstead attributed this to mere unfriendliness, never suspecting that in one hour between editions an editor could have subtly sensed a popular readiness to accept the worst view of his case, and deliberately pandered to it as a mere matter of commercial newsmongering; nor that this unfavorable account was to be accepted as the first straw blown up in a hurricane of adverse criticism which would rise and sweep over the city and
