But why did she plot against Hampstead? What was between the clergyman and herself? Why did Hampstead not strike out boldly and clear himself at one stroke, by the mere opening of his lips? He not only had not defended himself, but the papers declared he had a guilty air, that he fought against the opening of the box, and bore himself in a manner that convinced even his bondsmen he was guilty.
But the newspaper chanced to relate as an interesting detail how the minister had quickly recovered his self-possession, to the extent of rearranging the contents of his box after their handling by Assistant District Attorney Searle, and that he had even casually destroyed one paper with the remark that it was something no longer to be preserved.
This almost accidental sentence gave Rollie the strangest feeling of all. He knew what it must have been that was destroyed,—the evidence of his own indebtedness, to explain which would inevitably lead to his exposure. This, too, accounted for the preacher's protest and his apparent guilty fear. He could not know the diamonds were in the box; he did know the I. O. U. was there. He had destroyed it at the very moment when the discovery of the diamonds must surely have convinced him that the culprit he was shielding had betrayed him like a Judas.
"And yet he stands pat!" breathed Rollie huskily, while the greatest emotion of human gratitude that his heart could hold swelled his breast almost to bursting.
"I didn't know they made a man that would stand the gaff like that," he confessed after a further reflective interval.
Burbeck's first instinct was to rush to the telephone and acquit himself in the minister's mind of all complicity in the plot; for inevitably Rollie thought first of himself.
