ment with her, the actress, in a moment of reckless passion, had charged him with stealing them. Under the circumstances, Hampstead, as a chivalrous man, declined to speak, knowing full well that sooner or later the woman's passion would relent, and she would release him from the awkward position in which he stood."
There were holes in this story. At places it did not fit the facts; as for instance, the minor fact that by common agreement the minister did not leave the dinner party until considerably after twelve, consequently at a time when the bank vault was inaccessible. There was also the major fact that the theft of the diamonds was discovered and reported at two o'clock in the morning, and not the next day "after the minister's failure to keep an appointment with the actress had angered her."
But these trifling discrepancies were disregarded by the eager rewrite man, who threw this story together from the harvesting of half a dozen leg-weary reporters.
Nor did they matter greatly to Hampstead. He read the story with whitening lips. He recognized it as the sort of vindication that would ruin him. It made his position a thousand times more difficult. It was infinitely harder to keep silence when the very truth itself was blunderingly mixed to malign him.
Nor did the public mind the discrepancies greatly. The Messenger's story was a triumph of journalism. It was the most eagerly read, the most convincingly detailed explanation of what had occurred. The public absorbed it with a sense of relief that at last it had learned how such a man as John Hampstead could have fallen as he had. The story even excited a little sympathy for the minister by revealing the unexpected element of romance in his life. Nevertheless, its publication upon the evening of the third day after the minister's arrest battered away the last pretense of any considerable section of the popular mind
