"There, there, girl, don’t cry," urged her uncle soothingly. "There is no occasion for it; this is annoying but not necessarily distressing. It is a mere formality of the law which must be complied with. Run along now, all of you, and wash the tears out of your eyes. I will be with you in five minutes. Let us sit down to a happy, cheerful dinner. I confess I am a little upset myself, but not too disturbed to be hungry," and with a weak attempt at grimacing humor, the big man laid a hand upon the region of his diaphragm. In his study, as Rose had forewarned him, the minister found four men: Searle, Assistant District Attorney; Wyatt, Deputy Sheriff; and two city detectives. Searle was a suave, resourceful man and the one assistant in the District Attorney’s office whom Hampstead had found himself unable to trust; and that rather because of his personal and political associations than for any overt act of which the minister was cognizant. Wyatt was a bloated person, amiable in disposition, whose excess of egotism was coupled with a paucity of intelligence, yet wholly incorruptible and with an exaggerated sense of duty that made him a capable officer,—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.