I'm so sorry for the break that, orders or no orders, I'll just step out in the hall while you finish. But all the same, you listen to her," and he indicated the disturbed and slightly offended Mrs. Burbeck with a stab of a toothpick in the air, "and she'll tell you somethin' that's useful."
"Thank you very much, Wyatt," replied the minister in noncommittal tones, but with a sigh of relief as the deputy withdrew from the room.
Yet he had a growing sense of depression. Wyatt's boorish, croaking interruption had thrown him out of poise. Mrs. Burbeck's exaggerated sense of the gravity of the matter weighed him down like lead, and the more because an inner voice, sounding faintly and from far away, but with significance unmistakable, seemed to tell him her view was right. Nevertheless, his whole soul rose in protest. It ought not to be right. It was a gross travesty on justice and on popular good sense.
Mrs. Burbeck, looking at him fixedly, noted this change in spirit and the conflict of emotions which resulted. Reaching out impulsively, she touched the large hand of the man where it lay upon the desk.
"I feared you would take it too lightly," she reflected. "Youth always does that. For this world about you to turn and gnash you is mere human nature, which it is your business to understand. Has it never occurred to you that the same voices who upon Sunday cried out: 'Hosannah, Hosannah to the son of David!' upon Friday shouted: 'Away with him! Crucify him! Crucify him!'"
"But I am innocent," Hampstead protested, though weakly.
"And so was He," Mrs. Burbeck replied simply.
"But He was worthy to suffer. I am not," murmured Hampstead humbly.
