said Baird. "More people than yourselves discuss it. It formed a chief topic of conversation when I dined with Senator Milner, two nights ago."

"Milner!" said Tom. "He was the man who had not time to hear me in the morning."

"His daughter, Mrs. Meredith, was inquiring about you. She wanted to hear the story. I shall tell it to her."

"Ah!" exclaimed Tom; "if _you_ tell it, it will have a chance."

"Perhaps," Baird laughed. "I may be able to help you. A man who is used to audiences might be of some practical value."

He met Sheba's eyes by accident. A warm light leaped into them.

"They care a great deal more than they will admit to me," she said to him, when chance left them together a few minutes later, as Tom and Rupert were showing Latimer some books. "They are afraid of making me unhappy by letting me know how serious it will be if everything is lost.

They care too much for me--but I care for them, and if I could do anything--or go to anyone----"

He looked into her eyes through a curious moment of silence.

"It was not all jest," he said after it, "what I said just now. I am a man who has words, and words sometimes are of use. I am going to give you my words--for what they are worth."

"We shall feel very rich," she answered, and her simple directness might have been addressed to a friend of years' standing. It was a great charm, this sweet acceptance of any kindness. "But I thought you were going away in a few days?"

"Yes. But I shall come back, and I shall try to set the ball rolling before I go."

She glanced at Latimer across the room.

"Mr. Latimer--" she hesitated; "do you think he does not mind that--that the claim means so much for us? I was afraid. He looked at me so seriously----"

"He looked at you a great deal," interposed Baird, quickly. "He could not help it. I am glad to have this opportunity to tell you--something. You are very like--_very_ like--someone he loved deeply--someone who died years ago. You must forgive him. It was almost a shock to him to come face to face with you."

"Ah!" softly. "Someone who died years ago!" She lifted Margery's eyes and let them rest upon Baird's face. "It must be very strange--it must be almost awful--to find yourself near a person very like someone you have loved--who died years ago."

"Yes," he answered. "Yes--awful. That is the word."

When the two men walked home together through the streets, the same thought was expressed again, and it was Latimer who expressed it.

"And when she looked at me," he said, "I almost cried out to her, 'Margery, Margery!' The cry leaped up from the depths of me. I don't know how I stopped it. Margery was smaller and more childlike--her eyes are darker, her face is her own, not Margery's--but she looks at one as Margery did. It is the simple clearness of her look, the sweet belief, which does not know life holds a creature who could betray it."

"Yes, yes," broke from Baird. The exclamation seemed involuntary.

"Yet there was one who could betray it," Latimer said.

"You _cannot_ forget," said Baird. "No wonder."

Latimer shook his head.

"The passing of years," he said, "almost inevitably wipes out or dims all things; but sometimes--not often, thank Fate--there comes a phase of suffering in some man or woman's life which will not go. I once knew a woman--she was the kind of woman people envy, and whose life seems brilliant and full; it was full of the things most people want, but the things she wanted were not for her, and there was a black wound in her soul. She had had a child who had come near to healing her, and suddenly he was torn out of her being by death. She said afterwards that she knew she had been mad for months after it happened, though no one suspected her. In the years that followed she dared not allow herself to speak or think of that time of death. 'I must not let myself--I must not.' She said this to me, and shuddered, clenching her hands when she spoke.

'Never, never, never, will it be better. If a thousand years had passed it would always be the same. One thought or word of it drags me back--and plunges me deep into the old, awful woe. Old--it is not old--it never can be old. It is as if it had happened yesterday--as if it were happening to-day.' I know this is not often so. But it is so with me when a thing drags Margery back to me--drags me back to Margery. To-night, Baird; think what it is to-night!"

He put a shaking hand on Baird's hand, hurrying him by the unconscious rapidity of his own pace.

"Think what it is to-night," he repeated. "She seems part of my being. I cannot free myself. I can see her as she was when she last looked at me, as her child looked at me to-night--with joyful bright eyes and lips. It was one day when I went to see her at Boston. She was doing a little picture, and it had been praised at the studio. She was so happy--so happy. That was the last time."

"Don't, don't," cried Baird; "you must not call it back."

"I am not calling it back. It comes, it comes! You must let me go on. You can't stop me. That was the last time. The next time I saw her she had changed. I scarcely knew how--it was so little. The brightness was blurred. Then--then comes all the rest. Her growing illness--the anxiousness--the long days--the girl at the mills--the talk of those women--the first ghastly, damnable fear--the nights--the lying awake!"

His breath came short and fast. He could not stop himself, it was plain.

His words tumbled over each other as if he were a man telling a story in delirium.

"I can see her," he said. "I can see her--as I went into her room. I can see her shaking hands and lips and childish, terrified eyes. I can feel her convulsive little fingers clutching my feet, and her face--her face--lying upon them when she fell down."

"I cannot bear it," cried Baird; "I cannot bear it." He had uttered the same cry once before. He had received the same answer.

"She bore it," said Latimer, fiercely. "That last night--in the cabin on the hillside--her cries--they were not human--no, they did not sound human----"

He was checked. It was Baird's hand which clutched his arm now--it seemed as if for support. The man was swaying a little, and in the light of a street-lamp near them he looked up in a ghastly appeal.

"Latimer," he said. "Don't go on; you see I can't bear it. I am not so strong as I was--before I began this work. I have lost my nerve. You bring it before me as it is brought before yourself. I am living the thing. I can't bear it."

Latimer came back from the past. He made an effort to understand and control himself.

"Yes," he said, quite dull; "that was what the woman I spoke of told me--that she lived the thing again. It is not sane to let one's self go back. I beg your pardon, Baird."

CHAPTER XXXIV

"It's a curious job, that De Willoughby claim," was said in a committee-room of the House, one day. "It's beginning to attract attention because it has such an innocent air. The sharp ones say that may be the worst feature of it, because ingenuousness is more dangerous than anything else if a job is thoroughly rotten. The claimants are the most straightforward pair the place has ever seen--a big, humourous, well-mannered country man, and a boy of twenty-three. Rutherford, of Hamlin County, who is a monument of simplicity in himself, is heart and soul in the thing--and Farquhar feels convinced by it. Farquhar is one of the men who are not mixed up with jobs. Milner himself is beginning to give the matter a glance now and then, though he has not committed himself; and now the Reverend John Baird, the hero of the platform, is taking it up."

Baird had proved his incidental offer of aid to have been by no means an idle one. He had been obliged to absent himself from Washington for a period, but he had returned when his lecture tour had ended, and had shown himself able in a new way. He was the kind of man whose conversation people wish to hear. He chose the right people and talked to them about the De Willoughby claim. He was interesting and picturesque in connection with it, and lent the topic attractions. Tom had been shrewdly right in saying that his talk of it would give it a chance.

He went often to the house near the Circle. Latimer did not go with him, and had himself explained his reasons to big Tom.

"I have seen her," he said. "It is better that I should not see her often. She is too much like her mother."

But Baird seemed to become by degrees one of the household. Gradually--and it did not take long--Tom and he were familiar friends. They had long talks together, they walked side by side through the streets, they went in company to see the men it was necessary to hold interviews with. Their acquaintance became an intimacy which established itself with curious naturalness. It was as if they had been men of the same blood, who, having spent their lives apart, on meeting, found pleasure in the discovery of their relationship. The truth was that for the first time in his life big Tom enjoyed a friendship with a man who was educated and, in a measure, of the world into which he himself had been born. Baird's world had been that of New England, his own, the world of the South; but they could comprehend each other's parallels and precedents, and argue from somewhat similar planes. In the Delisleville days Tom had formed no intimacies, and had been a sort of Colossus set apart; in the mountains of North Carolina he had consorted with the primitive and uneducated in good-humoured, even grateful, friendliness; but he had mentally lived like a hermit. To have talked to Jabe Doty or Nath Hayes on any other subjects than those of crops and mountain politics or sermons would have been to bewilder them hopelessly. To find himself in mental contact with a man who had lived and thought through all the years during which he himself had vegetated at the Cross-roads, was a wonderful thing to him. He realised that he had long ago given up expecting anything approaching such companionship, and that to indulge in it was to live in a new world. Baird's voice, his choice of words, his readiness and tact, the very carriage of his fine, silvering head, produced on him the effect of belonging to a new species of human being.

"You are all the things I have been missing for half a lifetime," he said. "I didn't know what it was I was making up my mind to going without--but it was such men as you."

On his own part, Baird felt he had made a rich discovery also. The large humour and sweetness, the straightforward unworldliness which was still level-headed and observing, the broad kindliness and belief in humanity which were so far from unintelligent or injudicious, were more attractive to him than any collected characteristics he had met before. They seemed to meet some strained needs in him. To leave his own rooms, and find his way to the house whose atmosphere was of such curious, homely brightness, to be greeted by Sheba's welcoming eyes, to sit and chat with Tom in the twilight or to saunter out with him with an arm through his, were things he soon began to look forward to. He began also to realise that this life of home and the affections was a thing he had lived without. During his brief and wholly unemotional married life he had known nothing like it.

His years of widowerhood had been presided over by Mrs. Stornaway, who had assumed the supervision of his child as a duty. Annie had been a properly behaved, rather uninteresting and unresponsive little person.

She had neat features and a realisation of the importance of respectability and the proprieties which was a credit to Willowfield and her training. She was never gay or inconsequent or young. She had gone to school, she had had her frocks lengthened and been introduced at tea-parties, exactly as had been planned for her. She never committed a breach of discretion and she never formed in any degree an element of special interest. She greatly respected her father's position as a successful man, and left it to be vaguely due to the approbation of Willowfield.

Big Tom De Willoughby, in two wooden rooms behind a cross-roads store, in a small frame house kept in order by a negro woman, and in the genteel poverty of Miss Burford's second floor, had surrounded himself with the comforts and pleasures of the affections. It was not possible to enter the place without feeling their warmth, and Baird found himself nourished by it. He saw that Rupert, too, was nourished by it. His young good looks and manhood were developing under its influence day by day. He seemed to grow taller and stronger. Baird had made friends with him, too, and was with them the night he came in to announce that at last he had got work to do.

"It is to sell things from behind a counter," he said, and he went to Sheba and lifted her hand to his lips, kissing it before them all. "We know a better man who has done it."

"You know a bigger man who has done it," said Tom. "He did it because he was cut out for a failure. You are doing it because you are cut out for a success. It will be a good story for the reporters when the claim goes through, my boy."