John Hampstead began as a rate clerk with a face nobody thought fit for the stage, played leading man to the ambitious actress Marien Dounay, and then gave up the theatre to bring up his widowed sister's children and preach at All People's Church. Years later Marien comes to his city a star, wearing a fortune in diamonds and wanting from him something he will not give. When the necklace vanishes after her supper party, a frightened young bank clerk confesses the theft to the minister, and by evening the papers say that the Reverend John Hampstead is to be arrested for it. MacFarlane had been a preacher himself before he became a magazine writer, and knew both the pulpit and the newspapers from the inside. Fifty-six plates, from Boldini's stage portraits to George Inness landscapes, follow the story's turn from theatre footlights to the parlour and the pulpit.