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. But thought for himself recalled the threat of Marien Dounay. How fiercely she had warned him that his secret was not his own, but hers! He grasped the significance of her threat now as she had shrewdly calculated that he would. Let him murmur a word, let him attempt, no matter how subtly or adroitly, to set in motion any plan that would loosen the tightening coils about John Hampstead, and this woman would turn her crazy vengeance on him, would fasten his crime upon him, would do a baser thing than that,—would make it appear that he had deliberately placed the diamonds in the minister’s vault, thus causing her innocently to do him this grave injustice. Thus in his exposure he would not be contemplated with indulgent sadness as a gentleman weakling who had descended to vulgar crime to make good another crime as heinous; but, on the contrary, would be regarded hatefully, repulsively, with loathsome scorn and withering contempt, as a despicable ingrate base enough to shift his guilt to the shoulders of the one who had rescued him. Before this prospect, fear paralyzed every other impulse of his heart, every faculty of his brain. His head was aching violently. He pressed his hands against his temples, and wondered how he could get quietly out of here and where he could fly.