A few nights later, as they sat together, Baird and Latimer spoke of this incident and of the lecture it had followed upon.

"Repentance! Repentance!" Latimer said. "What led _you_ to dwell upon repentance?"

"Thirty years of life," was Baird's answer. "Forty of them." He was leaning forward gazing into the red-hot coals. "And after our talk," he added, deliberately. "Margery."

Latimer turned and gazed at him.

Baird nodded.

"Yes," he said. "Her picture. Her innocent face and the soft, helpless youth of it. Such young ignorance is helpless--helpless! If in any hour of ruthlessness--or madness--a man had done such tenderness a wrong, what repentance--_what_ repentance could undo?"

"None," said Latimer, and the words were a groan. "None--through all eternity."

It was not a long silence which followed, but it seemed long to both of them. A dead stillness fell upon the room. Baird felt as if he were waiting for something. He knew he was waiting for something, though he could not have explained to himself the sensation. Latimer seemed waiting too--awaiting the power and steadiness to reach some resolve. But at length he reached it. He sat upright and clutched the arms of his chair.

It was for support.

"Why not now?" he cried; "why not now? I trust you! I trust you! Let me unburden my soul. I will try."

It was Baird's involuntary habit to sink into easy attitudes; the long, supple form of his limbs and body lent themselves to grace and ease. But he sat upright also, his hands unconsciously taking hold upon the arms of his chair as his companion did.

For a moment the two gazed into each other's eyes, and the contrast between their types was a strange one--the one man's face dark, sallow, harsh, the other fine, sensitive, and suddenly awake with emotion.

"I trust you," said Latimer again. "I would not have confessed the truth to any other living creature--upon the rack."

His forehead looked damp under his black locks.

"You would not have confessed the _truth_," Baird asked, in a hushed voice, "about what?"

"Margery," answered Latimer. "Margery."

He saw Baird make a slight forward movement, and he went on monotonously.

"She did not die in Italy," he said. "She did not die lying smiling in the evening sun."

"She--did not?" Baird's low cry was a thing of horror.

"She died," Latimer continued, in dull confession, "in a log cabin in the mountains of North Carolina. She died in anguish--the mother of an hour-old child."

"My God! My God! My God!"

Three times the cry broke from Baird.

He got up and walked across the room and back.

"Wait--wait a moment!" he exclaimed. "For a moment don't go on."

As the years had passed, more than once he had been haunted by a dread that some day he might come upon some tragic truth long hidden. Here he was face to face with it. But what imagination could have painted it like this?

"You think my lie--a damnable thing," said Latimer.

"No, no!" answered the other man, harshly. "No, no!"

He moved to and fro, and Latimer went on.

"I never understood," he said. "She was a pure creature, and a loving, innocent one."

"Yes," Baird groaned; "loving and innocent. Go on--go on! It breaks my heart--it breaks my heart!"

Remembering that he had said "You might have been my brother," Latimer caught his breath in a groan too. He understood. He had forgotten-- forgotten. But now he must go on.

"At home she had been always a bright, happy, tender thing. She loved us and we loved her. She was full of delicate gifts. We are poor people; we denied ourselves that we might send her to Boston to develop her talent.

She went away, radiant and full of innocent gratitude. For some time she was very happy. I was making every effort to save money to take her abroad that she might work in the studios there. She had always been a delicate little creature--and when it seemed that her health began to fail, we feared the old terrible New England scourge of consumption. It always took such bright things as she was. When she came home for a visit her brightness seemed gone. She drooped and could not eat or sleep. We could not bear to realise it. I thought that if I could take her to France or Italy she might be saved. I thought of her day and night--day and night."

He paused, and the great knot in his throat worked convulsively in the bondage of his shabby collar. He began again when he recovered his voice.

"I thought too much," he said. "I don't know how it was. But just at that time there was a miserable story going on at the mills--I used to see the poor girl day by day--and hear the women talk. You know how that class of woman talks and gives you details and enlarges on them? The girl was about Margery's age. I don't know how it was; but one day, as I was standing listening to a gossipping married woman in one of their squalid, respectable parlours, and she was declaiming and denouncing and pouring forth anecdotes, suddenly--quite suddenly--I felt as if something had struck me. I turned sick and white and had to sit down. Oh, God! what an afternoon that was! and how long it seemed before I got back home."

He stopped again. This time he wiped sweat from his forehead before he continued, hoarsely:

"I cannot go over it--I cannot describe the steps by which I was led to--horrid fear. For two weeks I did not sleep a single night. I thought I was going mad. I laid awake making desperate plans--to resort to in case--in case----!"

His forehead was wet again, and he stopped to touch it with his handkerchief.

"One day I told my mother I was going to Boston to see Margery--to talk over the possibility of our going abroad together with the money I had worked for and saved. I had done newspaper work--I had written religious essays--I had taught. I went to her."

It was Baird who broke the thread of his speech now. He had been standing before a window, his back to the room. He turned about.

"You found?" he exclaimed, low and unsteady. "You found----?"

"It was true," answered Latimer. "The worst."

Baird stood stock still; if Latimer had been awake to externals he would have seen that it was because he could not move--or speak. He was like a man stunned.

Latimer continued:

"She was sitting in her little room alone when I entered it. She looked as if she had been passing through hours of convulsive sobbing. She sat with her poor little hands clutching each other on her knees. Hysteric shudders were shaking her every few seconds, and her eyes were blinded with weeping. A child who had been beaten brutally might have sat so. She was too simple and weak to bear the awful terror and woe. She was not strong enough to conceal what there was to hide. She did not even get up to greet me, but sat trembling like an aspen leaf."

"What did you say to her?" Baird cried out.

"I only remember as one remembers a nightmare," the other man answered, passing his hand over his brow. "It was a black nightmare. I saw before I spoke, and I began to shake as she was shaking. I sat down before her and took both her hands. I seemed to hear myself saying, 'Margery--Margery, don't be frightened--don't be afraid of Lucian. I will help you, Margery; I have come to talk to you--just to talk to you.' That was all. And she fell upon the floor and lay with her face on my feet, her hands clutching them."

For almost five minutes there was no other word spoken, but the breathing of each man could be heard.

Then Latimer's voice broke the stillness, lower and more monotonous.

"I had but one resolve. It was to save her and to save my mother. All the soul of our home and love was bound up in the child. Among the desperate plans I had made in the long nights of lying awake there had been one stranger than the rest. I had heard constantly of Americans encountering each other by chance when they went abroad. When one has a secret to keep one is afraid of every chance, however remote. Perhaps my plan was mad, but it accomplished what I wanted. Years before I had travelled through the mountain districts of North Carolina. One day, in riding through the country roads, I had realised their strange remoteness from the world, and the fancy had crossed my mind that a criminal who dressed and lived as the rudely scattered population did, and who chose a lonely spot in the woods, might be safer there than with the ocean rolling between him and his secret. I spent hours in telling her the part she was to play. It was to be supposed that we had gone upon the journey originally planned.

We were to be hidden--apparently man and wife--in some log cabin off the road until all was over. I studied the details as a detective studies his case. I am not a brilliant man, and it was intricate work; but I was desperate. I read guide-books and wrote letters from different points, and arranged that they should be sent to our mother at certain dates for the next few months.