a thing with which his breeding, which was obtrusively low, did not interfere.
Hampstead was able to master his feelings sufficiently to greet the quartet urbanely, if not cordially.
"A disagreeable duty, I assure you," conceded Searle.
"A disagreeable experience," laughed Hampstead, but with no great suggestion of levity.
"I guess I don't need to read this to you, Doc," said the Deputy Sheriff, as he opened to Hampstead a document drawn from his pocket. "It is a warrant for your arrest."
The minister took the document and glanced it through, his eyes hesitating for a moment at the name of the complaining witness.
"Alice Higgins?" he asked, with an inquiring glance.
"The true name of the complaining witness and accuser," replied Searle.
"Oh, I see," assented John.
It had never occurred to him that Marien Dounay was only a stage name. Was there anything at all about this woman that was not false, he wondered.
John returned the warrant to Wyatt and caught the look in that officer's eye. A sense of the horrible indignity of arrest came over the minister, a perception of what it meant: this yielding of one's liberty, of one's body to the possession of another, who might be a coarser and more inferior person than one's self. With a guilty flush, John thought how many times in his crusades against the gamblers and small law-breakers he had procured the swearing out of complaints that led to the arrest of scores of men. He had marveled at the venomous hatred which those men later displayed toward himself, regarding him as the author of a public disgrace put upon them, and not upon them alone but upon their families also. Now he understood.
