"Your situation calls for the exercise of some manhood—if you have it," he said sharply. "Tell me. Why did you come here?" "To get you to help me out!" the broken man murmured helplessly, twisting his hat in his hands. "That was all. I won’t lie to you. You’ve never turned anybody down. Don’t turn me down!" "It was on your mother’s account?" "No, I’m not as unselfish as that. It’s just myself. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’ve lost my nerve. I had it all right enough when I took ’em, except for just a minute after; that’s when I met you going away, and with that damned uncanny way of yours you dropped on that something was wrong. But I had my nerve all right; I had it till I got out there on the street this morning and that rope wasn’t swinging there over the cornice. Damn the Red Lizard! All I ask is to get out of this, and then to get him by the throat!" Surely the man had recovered a portion of his nerve, for at the thought of the failure of his partner in crime, his face was suffused with rage, and his weak, writhing hands became twisting talons that groped for the throat of an imaginary Red Lizard. At sight of this demonstration, Hampstead leaned back in his chair, with the air of one whose interest is merely pathological, observing the phenomena of a soul in the throes of incurable illness. His face was not even sympathetic. "You have come to the wrong place," he said briefly. "You won’t help me out?" "Not in your state of mind—which is a mere cowardice in defeat—mere rage at the failure of an accomplice. I should be accessory after the crime." "Not even to save my mother?" whined the wilted man. "I should be doing your mother no kindness to confirm her son in crime." Young Burbeck sat silent and baffled, yet somehow shocked into vigorous thought by the notion that he had encountered something hard, a man with a substratum of moral principle that was like immovable rock. For a moment the culprit’s eyes wandered helplessly about the room and then returned to the rugged face of the minister, with so much of gentleness and so much of strength upon it. Looking at the man thus, Rollie had a sudden, envious wish for his power. This man had a strength of character that was enormous and Gibraltar-like. "You can help me if you will!" he broke out wretchedly, straining and twisting his neck like a man battling with suffocation. "Yes," said the minister quietly, his eyes searching to the fellow’s very soul, "I can—if you will let me." "Let you?" and a hysterical smile framed itself on the young man’s face. "My God, I will do anything."