"Would you?" cried the Judge. "Why, nothing would suit me better—or them either, for that matter. I'll take you any day you say—any day."

"It ain't the easiest thing in the world to put a claim through," said Farquhar. "It means plenty of hard knocks and hard work and anxiety. Do you know that?"

"I don't know anything about it," answered the Judge. "But I'm going to get this one through if there's a way of doing it."

"You'll be misunderstood and called names and slandered," said Farquhar, regarding his rugged, ingenuous face with some curiosity. "There may be people—even in Hamlin County—who won't believe you are not up to some big deal. What are you doing it for?"

"Why, for Tom and Sheba and Rupert," said the Judge, in an outburst of neighbourliness. "That's folks enough to do it for, ain't it? There's three of 'em—and I'd do it for ary one—as we say in Barnesville," in discreet correction of the colloquialism.

Farquhar laughed a little, and put a hand on his shoulder as they moved away together. "I believe you would," he said; "perhaps that sort of thing is commoner in Barnesville than in Washington. I believe you would. Take me to see the claimants to-morrow."



CHAPTER XXVII

When Judge Rutherford piloted him up the broad, unpaved avenue towards the small house near Dupont Circle, the first objects which caught Farquhar's gaze were two young people standing among the unkempt rose and syringa bushes in the little front garden. The slim grace and bloom of their youth would have caught any eye. They were laughing happily, and the girl held a branch of rosy blossoms in her hand.

"Are they the claimants?" Farquhar enquired.

"One of them is," answered Rutherford. "But Sheba—Sheba counts somehow."

Sheba looked at the stranger with the soft gaze of deer-like eyes when he was presented to her. There was no shyness in her woodland smile.

"Judge Rutherford," she said, "Uncle Matt has come—Rupert's Matt, you know. We can't help laughing about it, but we can't help being happy."

The boyish Southern face at her side laughed and glowed. Matt represented to Rupert the Lares and Penates his emotional nature required and had been denied.

"If he were not such a practical creature," he said, "I might not know what to do with him. But he worked his way here by engaging himself for the journey as a sort of nurse to an invalid young man who wanted to join his family in Washington and was too weak to travel alone."

The further from romance the world drifts, the fairer it becomes in its fagged eyes. So few stories unfold themselves sweetly from beginning to end that a first chapter is always more or less alluring, and as he marked the youth and beauty of those two and saw how their young eyes and smiles met in question and response at every thought, to Farquhar, who still retained the fragments of an imagination not wholly blighted by the House of Representatives, it seemed rather as if he had wandered into a world where young Cupid and Psyche still moved and breathed in human guise. As central figures of a government claim, the pair were exquisitely incongruous. Their youth was so radiant and untried, their bright good looks so bloomed, that the man looking at them felt—with a realising sense of humour as well as fanciful sentiment—as if a spring wind wafted through a wood close grown with wild daffodils had swept into a heated manufactory where machinery whirred and ill-clad workers bent over their toil.

"Uncle Tom will be very glad to see you," said Sheba, as they went into the house. "Judge Rutherford says you will tell us what to do."

An interesting feature of the situation to Farquhar was the entire frankness and simplicity of those concerned in it. It was so clear that they knew nothing of the complications they might be called upon to face, that their ignorance was of the order of charm. If he had been some sharper claimant come to fleece them, their visitor knew this young dryad's eyes would have smiled at him just as gratefully.

As they mounted the stairs, a huge laugh broke forth above, and when they entered the small sitting-room Uncle Matt stood before Big Tom, holding forth gravely, his gray wool bared, his decently shabby hat in his hand.

"I'd er come as lady's maid, Marse Thomas De Willoughby," he was saying, "ef I couldn't er got here no other way. Seemed like I jest got to honin' atter Marse Rupert, an' I couldn't er stayed nohow. I gotter be whar dat boy is—I jest gotter."

Big Tom, rising to his full height to shake hands with his visitor, appeared physically to cast such disparagement on the size of the room as was almost embarrassing. Farquhar saw all his values as he met his honest, humourous eye.

"I've been talking to my nephew's body-guard," he said. "All right, Uncle Matt. You just go to Miss Burford and ask her to find you a shake-down. There's always a place to be found for a fellow like you."

"Marse Thomas De Willoughby," said Matt, "dish yer niggah man's not gwine to be in no one's way. I come yere to work—dat's what I come yere for. An' work's a thing dat kin be hunted down—en a man ain't needin' no gun to hunt it neder—an' he needn't be no mighty Nimrod." And he made his best bow to both men and shuffled out of the room.

To Farquhar his visit was an interesting experience and a novel one. For months he had been feeling that he lived in the whirl of a maelstrom of schemes and jobberies, the inevitable result of the policy of a Government which had promised to recoup those it had involuntarily wronged during a national convulsion. Upon every side there had sprung up claimants—many an honest one, and hordes of those not honest. There were obvious thieves and specious ones, brilliant tricksters and dull ones. Newspaper literature had been incited by the number and variety of claims, and claims—to a jocularity which spread over all the land. Farquhar had seen most of the types—the greenhorn, the astute planner, the man who had a wrong burning in his breast, the man who knew how to approach his subject and the man who did not, the man who buttonholed everybody and was diffuse and hopeful, and the man who was helpless before the task he had undertaken. He had never, however, seen anything like the De Willoughby claimants—big Tom telling his straightforward story with his unsanguine air, the attractive youngster adding detail with simple directness, and the girl, Sheba, her roe's eyes dilated with eager interest hanging upon their every word.

"It is one of the best stories I've heard," he said to Rutherford, on their way back. "But it's a big claim—it's a huge claim, and the Government is beginning to get restive."

"But don't you think they'll get it through?" exclaimed Judge Rutherford. "Ain't they bound to get it? It's the Lord's truth—every word they speak—the Lord's truth!"

"Yes," answered Farquhar, "that's how it struck me; but, as a rule, it isn't the Lord's truth that carries a big claim through."

He broke into a short laugh, as if at an inward realisation of the aspect of the situation.

"They are as straightforward as a lot of children," he said. "They have nothing to hide, and they wouldn't know how to hide it if they had. It would be rather a joke if——" And he laughed again.

"If what?" asked Rutherford.

"Ah, well! if that very fact was the thing which carried them through," his laugh ending in a shrewd smile.

This carried the ingenuous mind of his companion beyond its depth.

"I don't see where the joke would come in," he said, rather ruefully. "I should have thought nothing else would do it for them."

Farquhar slapped him on the shoulder.

"So you would," he said. "That's why you are the best advocate they could have. You are all woven out of the same cloth. You stand by them—and so will I."

Judge Rutherford seized his hand and shook it with affectionately ardent pumpings.

"That's what I wanted to make sure of," he said. "I'm going to work at this thing, and I want a man to help me who knows the ropes. Lord, how I should like to go back to Hamlin and tell Jenny and the boys that I'd put Tom through."

And as they walked up the enclosed road to the Capitol he devoted himself to describing anew Big Tom's virtue, popularity, and witticisms.

* * * * *

For weeks Talbot's Cross-roads found itself provided with a conversational topic of absorbing interest. Ethan Cronan, who had temporarily "taken on" the post-office and store, had no cause to fear that the old headquarters was in danger of losing popularity. The truth was that big Tom had so long presided over the daily gatherings that the new occupant of the premises was regarded merely as a sort of friendly representative. Being an amiable and unambitious soul, Ethan in fact regarded himself in the same light, and felt supported and indeed elevated by the fact that he stood in the shoes of a public character so universally popular and admired.

"I ain't Tom, an' I cayn't never come a-nigh him," he said; "but I kin do my best not to cast no disgrace on his place, an' allus tradin' as fair as I know how. It's a kinder honor to set in his chairs an' weigh sugar out in the scales he used—an' it drors trade too."

During the passage of the first few weeks, horses, waggons, and ox-teams crowded about the hitching-posts, while excitement ran high at mail-time. The general opinion was that any post might bring the news that Congress was "sitting on" the great De Willoughby claim, and that Washington waited breathless for its decision. That all other national business should be suspended seemed inevitable. That any mail should come and go without bringing some news was not contemplated. The riders of the horses and owners of the waggons sat upon the stone porch and discussed probabilities. They told each other stories they had gathered of the bygone glories of the De Willoughbys, of the obstinate loyalty of the old Judge and the bitter indignation of his neighbours, and enlarged upon the strength of the claim this gave him to the consideration of the Government.

"Tom won't have no trouble with his claim," was the general opinion. "He'll just waltz it through. Thar won't be a hitch."

But after the first letter in which he announced his safe arrival in the Capital City, Tom wrote no more for a week or so, which caused a disappointment only ameliorated by the belief that he was engaged in "waltzing" the claim through. Each man felt it necessary to visit the Cross-roads every day to talk over the possible methods employed, and to make valuable suggestions. Interest never flagged, but it was greatly added to when it was known that Judge Rutherford had ranged himself on Tom's side.

"He's the pop-larest man in Hamlin County," it was said, "an' he's bound to be a pop'lar man in Congress, an' have a pull."

But when the summer had passed, and a touch of frost in the night air loosened the chestnuts in their burrs, and a stray morning breeze shook them in showers down upon the carpet of rustling yellowed leaves, Tom's letters had become few and far between, and none of them had contained any account of the intentions of the legislative body with regard to the claim.

"There's nothing to tell, boys," he wrote. "As far as I've gone, it seems a man gets a claim through Congress by waiting about Washington and telling his story to different people until he wears them out—or they wear him out."

For some time after this they did not hear from him at all. The winter set in, and the habitues of the Cross-roads Post-office gathered about the glowing stove. Under the influence of cold gray skies, biting air, leafless trees, and bare land, the claim seemed somehow to have receded into the distance. The sanguine confidence of the community had not subsided into doubt so much as into helpless mystification. Months had passed and nothing whatsoever had happened.

"Seems somehow," said Jabe Doty one night, as he tilted his chair forward and stared at the fire in the stove, "seems somehow as if Tom was a right smart ways off—es ef he got furder as the winter closed in—a'most like Washin'ton city hed moved a thousand miles or so out West somewhars, an' took him with it."



CHAPTER XXVIII

To Tom himself it seemed that it was the old, easy-going mountain life which had receded. The days when he had sat upon the stone porch and watched the sun rise from behind one mountain and set behind another seemed to belong to a life lived centuries ago. But that he knew little of occult beliefs and mysteries, he would have said to himself that all these things must have happened in a long past incarnation.

The matter of the De Willoughby claim was brought before the House. Judge Rutherford opened the subject one day with a good deal of nervous excitement. He had supplied himself with many notes, and found some little difficulty in managing them, being new to the work, and he grew hot and uncertain because he could not secure an audience. Claims had already become old and tiresome stories, and members who were unoccupied pursued their conversation unmovedly, giving the speaker only an occasional detached glance. The two representatives of their country sitting nearest to him were, not at all furtively, eating apples and casting their cores and parings into their particular waste-paper baskets. This was discouraging and baffling. To quote the Judge himself, no one knew anything about Hamlin County, and certainly no one was disturbed by any desire to be told about it.

That night Rutherford went to the house near Dupont Circle. Big Tom was sitting in the porch with Rupert and Sheba. Uncle Matt was digging about the roots of a rose-bush, and the Judge caught a glimpse of Miss Burford looking out from behind the parlour curtains.

The Judge wore a wearied and vaguely bewildered look as he sat down and wiped his forehead with a large, clean white handkerchief.

"It's all different from what I thought—it's all different," he said.

"Things often are," remarked Tom, "oftener than not."

Rupert and Sheba glanced at each other questioningly and listened with anxious eyes.

"And it's different in a different way from what I expected," the Judge went on. "They might have said and done a dozen things I should have been sort of ready for, but they didn't. Somehow it seemed as if—as if the whole thing didn't matter."

Tom got up and began to walk about.

"That's not the way things begin that are going to rush through," he said.

Sheba followed him and slipped her hand through his arm.

"Do you think," she faltered, "that perhaps we shall not get the money at all, Uncle Tom?"

Tom folded her hand in his—which was easily done.

"I'm afraid that if we do get it," he answered, "it will not come to us before we want it pretty badly—the Lord knows how badly."

For every day counts in the expenditure of a limited sum, and on days of discouragement Tom's calculation of their resources left him a troubled man.

When Judge Rutherford had gone Rupert sat with Sheba in the scented summer darkness. He drew his chair opposite to hers and took one of her hands in both of his own.

"Suppose I have done a wrong thing," he said. "Suppose I have dragged you and Uncle Tom into trouble?"

"I am glad you came," in a quick, soft voice. "I am glad you came." And the slight, warm fingers closed round his.

He lifted them to his lips and kissed them over and over again. "Are you glad I came?" he murmured. "Oh, Sheba! Sheba!"

"Why do you say 'Oh, Sheba'?" she asked.

"Because I love you so—and I am so young—and I don't know what to do. You know I love you, don't you?"

She leaned forward so that he saw her lovely gazelle eyes lifted and most innocently tender. "I want you to love me," she said; "I could not bear you not to love me."

He hesitated a second, and then suddenly pressed his glowing face upon her palm.

"But I don't love you as Uncle Tom loves you, Sheba," he said. "I love you—young as I am—I love you—differently."

Her swaying nearer to him was a sweetly unconscious and involuntary thing. Their young eyes drowned themselves in each other.

"I want you," she said, the note of a young ring-dove answering her mate murmuring in her voice, "I want you to love me—as you love me. I love your way of loving me."

"Darling!" broke from him, his boy's heart beating fast and high. And their soft young lips were, through some mystery of power, drawn so near to each other that they met like flowers moved to touching by the summer wind.

Later Rupert went to Tom, who sat by an open window in his room and looked out on the moonlit stretch of avenue. The boy's heart was still beating fast, and, as the white light struck his face, it showed his eyes more like Delia Vanuxem's than they had ever been. Their darkness held just the look Tom remembered, but could never have described or explained to himself.

"Uncle Tom," he began, in an unsteady voice, "I couldn't go to bed without telling you."

Tom glanced up at him and learned a great deal. He put a big hand on his shoulder.

"Sit down, boy," he said, his kind eyes warming. Rupert sat down.

"Perhaps I ought not to have done it," he broke forth. "I did not know I was going to do it. I suppose I am too young. I did not mean to—but I could not help it."

"Sheba?" Tom inquired, simply.

"Her eyes were so lovely," poured forth the boy. "She looked at me so like an angel. Whenever she is near me, it seems as if something were drawing us together."

"Yes," was Tom's quiet answer.

"I want to tell you all about it," impetuously. "I have been so lonely, Uncle Tom, since my mother died. You don't know how I loved her—how close we were to each other. She was so sweet and wonderful—and I had nothing else."

Tom nodded gently.

"I remember," he said. "I never forgot."

He put the big hand on the boy's knee this time. "I loved her too," he said, "and I had nothing else."

"Then you know—you know!" cried Rupert. "You remember what it was to sit quite near her and see her look at you in that innocent way—how you longed to cry out and take her in your arms."

Tom stirred in his seat. Time rolled back twenty-five years.

"Oh, my God, yes—I remember!" he answered.

"It was like that to-night," the young lover went on. "And I could not stop myself. I told her I loved her—and she said she wanted me to love her—and we kissed each other."

Big Tom got up and stood before the open window. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets and he stared out at the beauty of the night.

"Good Lord!" he said. "That's what ought to come to every man that lives—but it doesn't."

Rupert poured forth his confession, restrained no more.

"From that first night when I rode through the mountains over the white road and stopped at your gate—since I looked up and saw her standing on the balcony with the narcissus in her hair it has always been the same thing. It began that very moment—it was there when she leaned forward and spoke to me. I had never thought of a woman before—I was too poor and sad and lonely and young. And there she was—all white—and it seemed as if she was mine."

Tom nodded his head as if to a white rose-bush in the small garden.

"I am as poor as ever I was," said Rupert. "I am a beggar if we lose our claim; but I am not sad, and I am not lonely—I can't be—I can't be! I am happy—everything's happy—because she knows—and I have kissed her."

"What did you think I would say when you told me?" Tom asked.

"I don't know," impetuously; "but I knew I must come to you. It seems a million years ago since that hot morning in the old garden at Delisleville—when I had never seen her."

"One of the things I have thought about a good deal," said Tom, with quite a practical manner, "has been love. I had lots of time to think over things at the Cross-roads, and I used to work them out as far as my mind would carry me. Love's as much an element as the rest of them. There's earth, air, fire, water—and love. It has to be calculated for. What I've reasoned out is that it has not been calculated for enough. It's going to come to all of us—and it will either come and stay, and make the old earth bloom with flowers—or it will come and go, and leave it like a plain swept by fire. It's not a trivial thing that only boys and girls play with; it's better—and worse. It ought to be prepared for and treated well. It's not often treated well. People have got into the way of expecting trouble and tragedy to come out of it. We are always hearing of its unhappiness in books. Poets write about it that way."

"I suppose it is often unhappy," said Rupert; "but just now it seems as if it could not be."

"What I've been wanting to see," said Tom, "is young love come up like a flower and be given its dew and sun and rain—and bloom and bloom its best."

He drew a big sigh.

"That poor child who lies on the hillside under the pines," he went on, "Sheba's mother—hers was young love—and it brought tragedy and death. Delia," his voice was unsteady, "your mother's was young love, and her heart was broken. No, it's not often well treated. And when you and Sheba came to me that night with your boy and girl eyes shining with gladness just because you had met each other, I said to myself, 'By the Lord, here is what it springs from. Perhaps it may come to them; I wonder if it will?'"

"You thought it might, even then," Rupert cried.

"Yes, I did," was Tom's answer. "You were young—you were drawn together—it seemed natural. I used to watch you, and think it over, making a kind of picture to myself of how it would be if two young things could meet each other and join hands and wander on among roses until they reached the gate of life—and it swung open for them and they passed through and found another paradise."

He stopped a second and turned to look at Rupert's dreamy face with a smile not all humorous. "I'm a sentimental chap for my size," he added. "That's what I wanted for Sheba and you—that's what I want. That sort of thing was left out of my life; but I should like to see it before I'm done with. Good God! why can't people be happy? I want people to be happy."

The boy was trembling.

"Uncle Tom," he said, "Sheba and I are happy to-night."

"Then God have mercy on the soul of the man who would spoil it for you," said Big Tom, with actual solemnity. "I'm not that man. You two just go on being happy; try and make up for what your two mothers had to bear."

Rupert got up from his chair and caught the big hand in his. It was a boy's action, and he looked particularly like a boy as he did it. "It is just like you," he broke forth. "I did not know what you would say when I told you—but I ought to have known you would say something like this. It's—it's as big as you are, Uncle Tom," ingenuously.

That was his good-night. When he went away Big Tom settled into his chair again and looked out for some time longer at the bright night. He was going back to two other nights which lay in the years behind. One was the night he turned his back on Delisleville and rode towards the mountain with a weight on his kindly heart which he had grimly told himself seemed to weigh a ton; the other was the night he had been wakened from his sleep by the knock on the door of the bedroom behind the Cross-roads Post-office and had ridden out under the whiteness of the moon to find in the bare cabin at Blair's Hollow the little fair girl who had sobbed and died as she clung to his warm hand.



CHAPTER XXIX

The world had heard and talked much of the Reverend John Baird in the years which followed his return to Willowfield. During the first few months after his reappearance among them, his flock had passed through a phase of restless uncertainty with regard to him. Certain elder members of his congregation had privately discussed questions of doctrine with anxiousness. Had not Nature already arraigned herself upon the man's side by bestowing upon him a powerful individuality, heads might have been shaken, and the matter discussed openly instead of in considerately confidential conclave. It was, however, less easy to enter into argument with such a man than with one slow and uncertain of tongue, and one whose fortunes rested in the hands of the questioners. Besides, it was not to be denied that even the elderly and argumentative found themselves listening to his discourses. The young and emotional often thrilled and quaked before them. In his hour he was the pioneer of what to-day we call the modern, and seemed to speak his message not to a heterogeneous mental mass, but to each individual man and woman who sat before him with upturned face. He was daringly human for the time in which he lived, it being the hour when humanity was overpowered by deity, and to be human was to be iconoclastic. His was not the doctrine of the future—of future repentance for the wrongs done to-day, of future reward for the good to-day achieves, all deeds being balanced on a mercantile account of profit and loss. His was a cry almost fierce, demanding, in the name of human woe, that to-day shall hold no cruelty, no evil done, even to the smallest and most unregarded thing.

By some chance—though he alone realised the truth of the fact—the subjects of his most realistic and intense appeals to his hearers had the habit of developing themselves in his close talks with Latimer. Among the friends of the man on whom all things seemed to smile, the man on whom the sun had never shone, and who faithfully worshipped him, was known as his Shadow. It was not an unfitting figure of speech. Dark, gloomy, and inarticulate, he was a strange contrast to the man he loved; but, from the hour he had stood by Latimer's side, leaning against the rail of the returning steamer, listening to the monotonously related story of the man's bereavement, John Baird had felt that Fate herself had knit their lives together. He had walked the deck alone long hours that night, and when the light of the moon had broken fitfully through the stormily drifting clouds, it had struck upon a pallid face.

"Poor fellow!" he had said between his teeth; "poor darkling, tragic fellow! I must try—try—oh, my God! I must try——"

Then their lives had joined currents at Willowfield, and the friendship Baird had asked for had built itself on a foundation of stone.

There was nothing requiring explanation in the fact that to the less fortunate man Baird's every gift of wit and ease was a pleasure and comfort. His mere physical attractions were a sort of joy. When Latimer caught sight of his own lank, ill-carried figure and his harshly rugged sallow face, he never failed to shrink from them and avert his eyes. To be the companion of a man whose every movement suggested strength and grace, whose skin was clear and healthful, his features well balanced and admirable in line—to be the friend of a human being built by nature as all human beings should be built if justice were done to them, was nourishment to his own starved needs.

When he assumed his charge at the squalid little town of Janway's Mills, his flock looked askance at him. He was not harsh of soul, but he was gloomy and had not the power to convey encouragement or comfort, though he laboured with strenuous conscientiousness. Among the sordid commonness of the every-day life of the mill hands and their families he lived and moved as Savonarola had moved and lived in the midst of the picturesque wickedness and splendidly coloured fanaticism of Italy in dim, rich centuries past; but his was the asceticism and stern self-denial of Savonarola without the uplifting power of passionate eloquence and fire which, through their tempest, awakened and shook human souls. He had no gifts of compelling fervor; he could not arouse or warm his hearers; he never touched them. He preached to them, he visited them at their homes, he prayed beside their dying and their dead, he gave such aid in their necessities as the narrowness of his means would allow, but none of them loved him or did more than stoically accept him and his services.

"Look at us as we stand together," he said to Baird on an evening when they stood side by side within range of an old-fashioned mirror. "Those things your reflection represents show me the things I was born without. I might make my life a daily crucifixion of self-denial and duty done at all costs, but I could not wear your smile or speak with your voice. I am a man, too," with smothered passion; "I am a man, too! And yet—what woman looks smilingly at me—what child draws near unafraid?"

"You are of the severe monastic temperament," answered Baird. "It is all a matter of temperament. Mine is facile and a slave to its emotions. Saints and martyrs are made of men like you—never of men such as I am."

"Are you sure of the value to the world of saints and martyrs?" said Latimer. "I am not. That is the worst of it."

"Ah! the world," Baird reflected. "If we dare to come back to the world—to count it as a factor——"

"It is only the world we know," Latimer said, his harsh voice unsteady; "the world's sorrow—the world's pain—the world's power to hurt and degrade itself. That is what seems to concern us—if we dare to say so—we, who were thrust into it against our wills, and forced to suffer and see others suffer. The man who was burned at the stake, or torn in the arena by wild beasts, believed he won a crown for himself—but it was for himself."

"What doth it profit a man," quoted Baird, vaguely, but as if following a thought of his own, "if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"

Latimer flung back his shock of uneven black locks. His hollow eyes flashed daringly.

"What doth it profit a man," he cried, "if he save his own soul and lose the whole world, caring nothing for its agony, making no struggle to help it in its woe and grieving? A Man once gave His life for the world. Has any man ever given his soul?"

"You go far—you go far!" exclaimed Baird, drawing a short, sharp breath.

Latimer's deep eyes dwelt upon him woefully. "Have you known what it was to bear a heavy sin on your soul?" he asked.

"My dear fellow," said John Baird, a little bitterly, "it is such men as I, whose temperaments—the combination of forces you say you lack—lead them to the deeds the world calls 'heavy sins'—and into the torment of regret which follows. You can bear no such burden—you have no such regret."

Latimer, whose elbow rested on the mantel, leaned a haggard forehead on his hand.

"I have sinned," he said. "It was that others might be spared; but I have put my soul in peril. Perhaps it is lost—lost!"

Baird laid a hand on his shoulder and shook him. It was a singular movement with passion in it.

"No! No!" he cried. "Rouse, man, and let your reason speak. In peril? Lost—for some poor rigid law broken to spare others? Great God! No!"

"Reason!" said Latimer. "What you and I must preach each week of our lives is that it is not reason a man must be ruled by, but blind, wilful faith."

"I do not preach it," Baird interposed. "There are things I dare to leave unsaid."

"I have spoken falsely," Latimer went on, heavily. "I have lived a lie—a lie—but it was to save pure hearts from breaking. They would have broken beneath the weight of what I have borne for them. If I must bear punishment for that, I—Let me bear it."

The rigid submission of generations of the Calvinistic conscience which presumed to ask no justice from its God and gave praise as for mercy shown for all things which were not damnation, and which against damnation's self dared not lift its voice in rebellion, had so far influenced the very building of his being that the revolt of reason in his brain filled him with gloomy terror. There was the appeal of despair on his face as he looked at Baird.

"Your life, your temperament have given you a wider horizon than mine," he said. "I have never been in touch with human beings. I have only read religious books—stern, pitiless things. Since my boyhood I have lived in terror of the just God—the just God—who visits the sins of the fathers upon the children even to the third and fourth generation. I—Baird—" his voice dropping, his face pallid, "I have hated Him. I keep His laws, it is my fate to preach His word—and I cower before Him as a slave before a tyrant, with hatred in my heart."

"Good God!" Baird broke forth, involuntarily. The force of the man's desperate feeling, his horror of himself, his tragic truthfulness, were strange things to stand face to face with. He had never confronted such a thing before, and it shook him.

Latimer's face relaxed into a singular, rather pathetic smile.

"Good God!" he repeated; "we all say that—I say it myself. It seems the natural human cry. I wonder what it means? It surely means something—something."

John Baird looked at him desperately.

"You are a more exalted creature than I could ever be," he said. "I am a poor thing by comparison; but life struck the wrong note for you. It was too harsh. You have lived among the hideous cruelties of old doctrines until they have wrought evil in your brain."

He stood up and threw out his arms with an involuntary gesture, as if he were flinging off chains.

"Ah, they are not true! They are not true!" he exclaimed. "They belong to the dark ages. They are relics of the days when the upholders of one religion believed that they saved souls by the stake and the rack and thumbscrew. There were men and women who did believe it with rigid honesty. There were men and women who, believing in other forms, died in torture for their belief. There is no God Who would ask such demoniac sacrifice. We have come to clearer days. Somewhere—somewhere there is light."

"You were born with the temperament to see its far-off glimmer even in your darkest hour," Latimer said. "It is for such as you to point it out to such as I am. Show it to me—show it to me every moment if you can!"

Baird put his hand on the man's shoulder again.

"The world is surging away from it—the chained mind, the cruelty, the groping in the dark," he said, "as it surged away from the revengeful Israelitish creed of 'eye for eye and tooth for tooth' when Christ came. It has taken centuries to reach, even thus far; but, as each century passed, each human creature who yearned over and suffered with his fellow has been creeping on dragging, bleeding knees towards the light. But the century will never come which will surge away from the Man who died in man's agony for men. In thought of Him one may use reason and needs no faith."

The germ of one of the most moving and frequently quoted of Baird's much-discussed discourses sprang—he told his friends afterwards—from one such conversation, and was the outcome of speech of the dead girl Margery. On a black and wet December day he came into his study, on his return from some parish visits, to find Latimer sitting before the fire, staring miserably at something he held in his hand. It was a little daguerrotype of Margery at fifteen.

"I found it in an old desk of mine," he said, holding it out to Baird, who took it and slightly turned away to lean against the mantel, as he examined it.

The child's large eyes seemed to light up the ugly shadows of the old-fashioned mushroom hat she wore, the soft bow of her mouth was like a little Love's, she bloomed with an angelic innocence, and in her straight sweet look was the unconscious question of a child-woman creature at the dawn of life.

John Baird stood looking down at the heavenly, tender little face.

There was a rather long silence. During its passing he was far away. He was still far away when at length an exclamation left his lips. He did not hear his words himself—he did not remember Latimer, or notice his quick movement of surprise.

"How sweet she was!" he broke forth. "How sweet she was! How sweet!"

He put his hand up and touched his forehead with the action of a man in a dream.

"Sometimes," he said, low and passionately, "sometimes I am sick with longing for her—sick!"

"You!" Latimer exclaimed. "You are heart-sick for her!"

Baird came back. The startled sound in the voice awoke him. He felt himself, as it were, dragged back from another world, breathless, as by a giant's hand. He looked up, dazed, the hand holding the daguerrotype dropping helplessly by his side.

"It is not so strange that it should come to that," he said. "I seem to know her so well. I think," there was a look of sharp pain on his face—"I think I know the pitiful childlike suffering her dying eyes held." And the man actually shuddered a little.

"I know it—I know it!" Latimer cried, and he let his forehead drop upon his hands and sat staring at the carpet.

"I have heard and thought of her until she has become a living creature," John Baird said. "I hear of her from others than yourself. Miss Starkweather—that poor girl from the mills, Susan Chapman—you yourself—keep her before me, alive. I seem to know the very deeps of her lovingness—and understand her. Oh, that she should have died!" He turned his face away and spoke his next words slowly and in a lowered voice. "If I had found her when I came back free—if I had found her here, living—we two might have been brothers."

"No, no!" Latimer cried, rising. "You—it could not——"

He drew his hand across his forehead and eyes.

"What are we saying?" he exclaimed, stammeringly. "What are we thinking of? For a moment it seemed as if she were alive again. Poor little Margery, with her eyes like blue flowers, she has been dead years and years and years."

* * * * *

It was not long after this that the Reverend John Baird startled a Boston audience one night by his lecture, "Repentance." In it he unfolded a new passionate creed which produced the effect of an electric shock. Newspapers reported it, editorials discussed it, articles were written upon it in monthly magazines. "Repentance is too late," was the note his deepest fervour struck with virile, almost terrible, intensity. "Repent before your wrong is done."

"Repentance comes too late," he cried. "We say a man saves his soul by it—his soul! We are a base, cowardly lot. Our own souls are saved—yes! And we hug ourselves and are comforted. But what of the thing we have hurt—for no man ever lost his soul unless he lost it by the wound he gave another—by inflicting in some other an agony? What of the one who has suffered—who has wept blood? I repent and save myself; but repentance cannot undo. The torture has been endured—the tears of blood shed. It is not to God I must kneel and pray for pardon, but to that one whose helplessness I slew, and, though he grant it me, he still has been slain."

The people who sat before him stirred in their seats; some leaned forward, breathing quickly. There were those who turned pale; here and there a man bent his head and a woman choked back a sob, or sat motionless with streaming eyes. "Repentance is too late—except for him who buys hope and peace with it. A lifetime of it cannot undo." The old comfortable convention seemed to cease to be supporting. It seemed to cease to be true that one may wound and crush and kill, and then be admirable in escaping by smug repentance. It seemed to cease to be true that humanity need count only with an abstract, far-off Deity Who can easily afford to pardon—that one of his poor myriads has been done to death. It was all new—strange—direct—and each word fell like a blow from a hammer, because a strong, dramatic, reasoning creature spoke from the depths of his own life and soul. In him Humanity rose up an awful reality, which must itself be counted with—not because it could punish and revenge, but because the laws of nature cried aloud as a murdered man's blood cries from the ground.

As Baird crossed the pavement to reach his cab, the first night he delivered this lecture, a man he knew but slightly stepped to his side and spoke to him.

"Mr. Baird," he said, "will you drive me to the station?"

Baird turned and looked at him in some surprise. There were cabs enough within hailing distance. The man was well known as a journalist, rather celebrated for his good looks and masculine charm. He was of the square-shouldered, easy-moving, rich-coloured type; just now his handsome eye looked perturbed.

"I am going away suddenly," he said, in answer to Baird's questioning expression. "I want to catch the next train. I want you to see me off—you."

"Let us get in," was Baird's brief reply. He had an instant revelation that the circumstance was not trivial or accidental.

As the door closed and the cab rolled away his companion leaned back, folding his arms.

"I had an hour to pass before keeping an appointment," he said. "And I dropped in to hear you. You put things before a man in a new way. You are appallingly vivid. I am not going to keep my appointment. It is not easy not to keep it! I shall take the train to New York and catch to-morrow's steamer to Liverpool. Don't leave me until you have seen me off. I want to put the Atlantic Ocean and a year of time between myself and——"

"Temptation," said Baird, though he scarcely realised that he spoke.

"Oh, the devil!" exclaimed the other man savagely. "Call her that if you like—call me that—call the whole thing that! She does not realise where we are drifting. She's a lovely dreamer and has not realised that we are human. I did not allow myself to realise it until the passion of your words brought me face to face with myself. I am repenting in time. Don't leave me! I can't carry it through to-night alone."

John Baird leaned back in the corner of the carriage and folded his arms also. His heart was leaping beneath them.

"Great God!" he said, out of the darkness. "I wish someone had said such words to me—years ago—and not left me afterwards! Years ago!"

"I thought so," his companion answered, briefly. "You could not have painted it with such flaming power—otherwise."

They did not speak again during the drive. They scarcely exchanged a dozen words before they parted. The train was in the station when they entered it.

Five minutes later John Baird stood upon the platform, looking after the carriages as they rolled out noisily behind trailing puffs of smoke and steam.

He had asked no questions, and, so far as his own knowledge was concerned, this was the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story. But he knew that there had been a story, and there might have been a tragedy. It seemed that the intensity of his own cry for justice and mercy had arrested at least one of the actors in it before the curtain fell.

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.

"My stronghold was that she was quite ignorant of travel and would think of nothing but that the letters came from me and were about Margery. I made Margery write two or three. Then I knew I could explain that she was not strong enough to write herself. I was afraid she might break down before we could leave home; but she did not. I got her away. By roundabout ways we travelled to the North Carolina mountains. We found a deserted cabin in the woods, some distance from the road. We dressed ourselves in the rough homespun of the country. She went barefooted, as most of the women did. We so secluded ourselves that it was some time before it was known that our cabin was inhabited. The women have a habit of wearing deep sunbonnets when about their work. Margery always wore one and kept within doors. We were thought to be only an unsociable married pair. Only once she found herself facing curious eyes. A sharp-faced little hoosier stopped one day to ask for a drink of water when I was away. He stared at her so intently that she was frightened; but he never came again. The child was born. She died."

"When it was born," Baird asked, "who cared for her?"

"We were alone," answered Latimer. "I did not know whom to call. I read medical books—for hours each day I read them. I thought that perhaps I might be able to do—what was necessary. But on the night she was taken ill—I was stricken with terror. She was so young and childlike—she had lived through months of torture—the agony seemed so unnatural to me, that I knew I must go for help—that I was not mentally calm enough to go through the ordeal. A strange chance took me to a man who had years before studied medicine as a profession. He was a singular being, totally unlike his fellows. He came to her. She died with her hand in his."

"Did the child die too?" Baird asked, after a pause.

"No; it lived. After she was laid in the earth on the hillside, I came away. It was the next day, and I was not sane. I had forgotten the child existed, and had made no plans for it. The man I spoke of—he was unmarried and lonely, and a strange, huge creature of a splendid humaneness—he had stood by me through all—a mountain of strength—the man came to my rescue there and took the child. It would be safe with him. I know nothing more."

"Do you not know his name?" Baird asked.

"Yes; he was called Dwillerby by the country people. I think he had been born a gentleman, though he lived as the mountaineers did."

"Afterwards," said Baird, "you went abroad as you had planned?"

"Yes. I invented the story of her death. I wrote the details carefully. I learned them as a lesson. It has been my mother's comfort—that story of the last day—the open window—the passing peasants—the setting sun—I can see it all myself. That is my lie. Did you suspect it when I told it?"

"No, God knows!" Baird answered. "I did not."

"Never?" inquired Latimer.

"What I have thought was that you had suffered much more than you wished your mother to know; that—perhaps—your sister had suffered more than you would reveal; and that you dreaded with all your being the telling of the story. But never such tragedy as this—never—never!"

"The man—the man who wrought that tragedy," began Latimer, staring darkly before him, "somewhere he stands to-night—unless his day is done. Somewhere he stands—as real a man as you."

"With all his load upon him," said Baird; "and he may have loved her passionately."

"It should be a heavy load," said Latimer, with bitter gloom; "heavy—heavy."

"You have not once uttered his name," said Baird, the thought coming to him suddenly.

"No," said Latimer; "I never knew it. She prayed so piteously that I would let her hide it. She knelt and sobbed upon my knee, praying that I would spare her that one woe. I could spare her no other, so I gave way. She thanked me, clinging to me and kissing my hand. Ah, her young, young heart wrung with sobs and tears!"

He flung himself forward against the table, hiding his face upon his arms, and wept aloud. Baird went and stood by him. He did not speak a word or lay his hand upon the shaking shoulders. He stood and gazed, his own chest heaving and awful tears in his eyes.



CHAPTER XXX

In later years, one at least of the two men never glanced back upon the months which followed without a shudder. And yet outwardly no change took place in their relations, unless they seemed drawn closer. Such a secret being shared between two people must either separate or bind them together. In this case it became a bond. They spoke of it but little, yet each was well aware that the other remembered often. Sometimes, when they sat together, Latimer recognised in Baird's eyes a look of brooding and felt that he knew what his thought was; sometimes Baird, glancing at his friend, found his face darkened by reverie, and understood. Once, when this was the case, he said, suddenly:

"What is your feeling about—the man? Do you wish to kill him?"

"It is too late," Latimer answered. "It would undo nothing. If by doing it I could bring her back as she was before she had seen his face—if I could see her again, the pretty, happy child, with eyes like blue convolvulus, and laughing lips—I would kill him and gladly hang for it."

"So would I," said Baird, grimly.

"To crucify him would not undo it," said Latimer, looking sickly pale. "She was crucified—she lived through terror and shame; she died—afraid that God would not forgive her."

"That God would not——!" Baird gasped.

Latimer's bony hands were twisted together.

"We were brought up to believe things like that," he said. "I was afraid, too. That was the damnable part of it. I could not help her. I have changed since then—I have changed through knowing you. As children we had always been threatened with the just God! The most successful preachers gained their power by painting pictures of the torments of hell. That was the fashion then," smiling horribly.

"It is a wonderful thing that even the fashion in Gods changes. When we were shut up together in the cabin on the hillside, she used to be overwhelmed by paroxysms of fear. She read the Bible a great deal—because sinners who wanted to repent always read it—and sometimes she would come upon threats and curses, and cry out and turn white and begin to shiver. Then she would beg me to pray and pray with her. And we would kneel down on the bare floor and pray together. My prayers were worse than useless. What could I say? I was a black sinner, too—a man who was perjuring his soul with lies—and they were told and acted for her sake, and she knew it. She used to cling about my neck and beg me to betray her—to whiten my soul by confession—not to allow her wickedness to destroy me—because she loved me—loved me. 'Go back to them and tell them, Lucien,' she would cry, 'I will go with you if I ought—I have been wicked—not you—I have been shameful; I must bear it—I must bear it.' But she could not bear it. She died."

"Were you never able to give her any comfort?" said Baird. His eyes were wet, and he spoke as in bitter appeal. "This had been a child in her teens entrapped into bearing the curse of the world with all its results of mental horror and physical agony."

"What comfort could I give?" was the answer. "My religion and my social creed had taught me that she was a vile sinner—the worst and most shameful of sinners—and that I was a criminal for striving to save her from the consequences of her sin. I was defying the law of the just God, who would have punished her with heart-break and open shame. He would not have spared her, and He would not spare me since I so strove against Him. The night she died—through the long hours of horrible, unnatural convulsions of pain—when cold sweat stood in drops on her deathly childish face, she would clutch my hands and cry out: 'Eternal torments! For ever and ever and ever—could it be like this, Lucien—for ever and ever and ever?' Then she would sob out, 'God! God! God!' in terrible, helpless prayer. She had not strength for other words."

Baird sprang to his feet and thrust out his hand, averting his pallid face.

"Don't tell me any more," he said. "I cannot—I cannot bear it."

"She bore it," said Latimer, "until death ended it."

"Was there no one—to save her?" Baird cried. "Was she terrified like that when she died?"

"The man who afterwards took her child—the man D'Willerby," Latimer answered, "was a kindly soul. At the last moment he took her poor little hand and patted it, and told her not to be frightened. She turned to him as if for refuge. He had a big, mellow voice, and a tender, protecting way. He said: 'Don't be frightened. It's all right,' and his were the last words she heard."

"God bless the fellow, wheresoever he is!" Baird exclaimed. "I should like to grasp his hand."

* * * * *

The Reverend John Baird delivered his lectures in many cities that year. The discussion they gave rise to had the natural result of awakening a keen interest in them. There were excellent souls who misinterpreted and deplored them, there were excellent souls who condemned; there were even ministers of the gospel who preached against the man as an iconoclast and a pagan, and forbade their congregations to join his audiences. But his lecture-halls were always crowded, and the hundreds of faces upturned to him when he arose upon his platform were the faces of eager, breathless, yearning creatures. He was a man speaking to men, not an echo of old creeds. He uttered no threats, he painted no hells, he called aloud to that God in man which is his soul.

"That God which is in you—in me," he proclaimed, "has lain dormant because undeveloped man, having made for himself in the dark ages gods of wood and stone, demanding awful sacrifice, called forth for himself later a deity as material, though embodied in no physical form—a God of vengeance and everlasting punishments. This is the man-created deity, and in his name man has so clamoured that the God which is man's soul has been silenced. Let this God rise, and He will so demand justice and noble mercy from all creatures to their fellows that temptation and suffering will cease. What! can we do no good deed without the promise of paradise as reward? Can we refrain from no evil unless we are driven to it by the threat of hell? Are we such base traffickers that we make merchandise of our souls and bargain for them across a counter? Let us awake! I say to you from the deepest depths of my aching soul—if there were no God to bargain with, then all the more awful need that each man constitute himself a god—of justice, pity, and mercy—until the world's wounds are healed and each human thing can stand erect and claim the joy of life which is his own."

On the morning of the day he said these words to the crowd which had flocked to hear him, he had talked long with Latimer. For some weeks he had not been strong. The passion of intensity which ruled him when he spoke to his audiences was too strong an emotion to leave no physical trace. After a lecture or sermon he was often pallid and shaken.

"I have things to say," he exclaimed feverishly to Latimer. "There are things which must be said. The spoken word lives—for good or evil. It is a sound sent echoing through all the ages to come. Some men have awakened echoes which have thrilled throughout the world. To speak one's thought—to use mere words—it seems such a small thing—and yet it is my conviction that nothing which is said is really ever forgotten."

And his face was white, his eyes burning, when at night he leaned forward to fling forth to his hearers his final arraignment.

"I say to you, were there no God to bargain with, then all the more awful need that each man constitute himself a god of justice, pity, and mercy—until the world's wounds are healed and each human thing can stand erect and claim the joy of life which is his own."

The people went away after the lecture, murmuring among themselves. Some of them carried away awakening in their eyes. They all spoke of the man himself; of his compelling power, the fire of meaning in his face, and the musical, far-reaching voice, which carried to the remotest corner of the most crowded buildings.

"It is not only his words one is reached by," it was said. "It is the man's self. Truly, he cries out from the depths of his soul."

This was true. It was the man himself. Nature had armed him well—with strength, with magnetic force, with a tragic sense of the anguish of things, and with that brain which labours far in advance of the thought of the hour. Men with such brains—brains which work fiercely and unceasingly even in their own despite—reach conclusions not yet arrived at by their world, and are called iconoclasts. Some are madly overpraised, some have been made martyrs, but their spoken word passes onward, and if not in their own day, in that to-morrow which is the to-day of other men, the truth of their harvest is garnered and bound into sheaves.

At the closing of his lectures, men and women crowded about him to speak to him, to grasp his hand. When they were hysterical in their laudations, his grace and readiness controlled them; when they were direct and earnest, he found words to say which they could draw aid from later.

"Am I developing—or degenerating—into a popular preacher?" he said once, with a half restless laugh, to his shadow.

"You are not popular," was Latimer's answer. "Popular is not the word. You are proclaiming too new and bold a creed."

"That is true," said Baird. "The pioneer is not popular. When he forces his way into new countries he encounters the natives. Sometimes they eat him—sometimes they drive him back with poisoned arrows. The country is their own; they have their own gods, their own language. Why should a stranger enter in?"

"But there is no record yet of a pioneer who lived—or died—in vain," said Latimer. "Some day—some day——"

He stopped and gazed at his friend, brooding. His love for him was a strong and deep thing. It grew with each hour they spent together, with each word he heard him speak. Baird was his mental nourishment and solace. When they were apart he found his mind dwelling on him as a sort of habit. But for this one man he would have lived a squalid life among his people at Janney's Mills—squalid because he had not the elasticity to rise above its narrow, uneducated dullness. The squalor so far as he himself was concerned was not physical. His own small, plain home was as neat as it was simple, but he had not the temperament which makes a man friends. Baird possessed this temperament, and his home was a centre of all that was most living. It was not the ordinary Willowfield household. The larger outer world came and went. When Latimer went to it he was swept on by new currents and felt himself warmed and fed.

There had been scarcely any day during years in which the two men had not met. They had made journeys together; they had read the same books and encountered the same minds. Each man clung to the intimacy.

"I want this thing," Baird had said more than once; "if you want it, I want it more. Nothing must rob us of it."

"The time has come—it came long ago—" his Shadow said, "when I could not live without it. My life has grown to yours."

It was Latimer's pleasure that he found he could be an aid to the man who counted for so much to him. Affairs which pressed upon Baird he would take in hand; he was able to transact business for him, to help him in the development of his plans, save him frequently both time and fatigue. It fell about that when the lectures were delivered at distant points the two men journeyed together.

Latimer entered Baird's library on one occasion just as a sharp-faced, rather theatrical-looking man left it.

"You'll let me know your decision, sir, as soon as possible," the stranger departed, saying. "These things ought always to be developed just at the right moment. This is your right moment. Everybody is talking you over, one way or another." When the stranger was gone, Baird explained his presence.

"That is an agent," he said; "he proposes that I shall lecture through the States. I—don't know," as if pondering the thing.

"The things you say should be said to many," remarked Latimer.

"The more the better," said Baird, reflectively; "I know that—the more the better."

They sat and talked the matter over at length. The objections to it were neither numerous nor serious.

"And I want to say these things," said Baird, a little feverishly. "I want to say them again and again."

Before they parted for the night it was decided that he should accede to the proposal, and that Latimer should arrange to be his companion.

"It is the lecture 'Repentance,' he tells me, is most in demand," Baird said, as he walked to the door, with a hand in Latimer's.



CHAPTER XXXI

Frequenters of the Capitol—whether loungers or politicians—had soon become familiar with the figure of one of the De Willoughby claimants. It was too large a figure not to be quickly marked and unavoidably remembered. Big Tom slowly mounting the marble steps or standing on the corridors was an object to attract attention, and inquiries being answered by the information that he was a party to one of the largest claims yet made, he not unnaturally was discussed with interest.

"He's from the depths of the mountains of North Carolina," it was explained; "he keeps a cross-roads store and post-office, but he has some of the best blood of the South in his veins, and his claim is enormous."

"Will he gain it?"

"Who knows? He has mortgaged all he owns to make the effort. The claim is inherited from his father, Judge De Willoughby, who died at the close of the war. As he lived and died within the Confederacy, the Government holds that he was disloyal and means to make the most of it. The claimants hold that they can prove him loyal. They'll have to prove it thoroughly. The Government is growing restive over the claims of Southerners, and there is bitter opposition to be overcome."

"Yes. Lyman nearly lost his last election because he had favoured a Southern claim in his previous term. His constituents are country patriots, and they said they weren't sending a man to Congress to vote for Rebs."

"That's the trouble. When men's votes are endangered by a course of action they grow ultra-conservative. A vote's a vote."

That was the difficulty, as Tom found. A vote was a vote. The bitterness of war had not yet receded far enough into the past to allow of unprejudiced judgment. Members of political parties were still enemies, wrongs still rankled, graves were yet new, wounds still ached and burned. Men who had found it to their interest to keep at fever heat the fierce spirit of the past four years of struggle and bloodshed, were not willing to relinquish the tactics which had brought fortunes to them. The higher-minded were determined that where justice was done it should be done where it was justice alone, clearly proved to be so. There had been too many false and idle claims brought forward to admit of the true ones being accepted without investigation and delay. In the days when old Judge De Willoughby had walked through the streets of Delisleville, ostracized and almost hooted as he passed among those who had once been his friends, it would not have been difficult to prove that he was loyal to the detested Government, but in these later times, when the old man lay quiet in what his few remaining contemporaries still chose to consider a dishonoured grave, undeniable proof of a loyalty which now would tend to the honour and advantage of those who were of his blood was not easy to produce.

"The man lived and died in the Confederacy," was said by those who were in power in Washington.

"He was constructively a rebel. We want proof—proof."

Most of those who might have furnished it if they would, were either scattered as to the four winds of the earth, or were determined to give no aid in the matter.

"A Southerner who deserted the South in its desperate struggle for life need not come to Southern gentlemen to ask them to help him to claim the price of his infamy." That was the Delisleville point of view, and it was difficult to cope with. If Tom had been a rich man and could have journeyed between Delisleville and the Capital, or wheresoever the demands of his case called him, to see and argue with this man or that, the situation would have simplified itself somewhat, though there would still have remained obstacles to be overcome.

"But a man who has hard work to look his room rent in the face, and knows he can't do that for more than a few months, is in a tight place," said Tom. "Evidence that will satisfy the Government isn't easily collected in Dupont Circle. These fellows have heard men talk before. They've heard too many men talk. There's Stamps, now—they've heard Stamps talk. Stamps is way ahead of me where lobbying is concerned. He knows the law, and he doesn't mind having doors shut in his face or being kicked into the street, so long as he sees a chance of getting indemnified for his 'herds of cattle.' I'm not a business man, and I mind a lot of things that don't trouble him. I'm not a good hand at asking favours and sitting down to talk steadily for a solid hour to a man who doesn't want to hear me and hasn't five minutes to spare." But for Rupert and Sheba he would have given up the claim in a week and gone back to Talbot's Cross-roads content to end his days as he began them when he opened the store—living in the little back rooms on beans and bacon and friend chicken and hominy.

"That suited me well enough," he used to say to himself, when he thought the thing over. "There were times when I found it a bit lonely—but, good Lord! loneliness is a small thing for a man to complain of in a world like this. It isn't fits or starvation. When a man's outlived the habit of expecting happiness, it doesn't take much to keep him going."

But at his side was eager youth which had outlived nothing, which believed in a future full of satisfied yearnings and radiant joys.

"I am not alone now," said Rupert; "I must make a place and a home for Sheba. I must not be only a boy in love with her; I must be a man who can protect her from everything—from everything. She is so sweet—she is so sweet. She makes me feel that I am a man."

She was sweet. To big Tom they were both sweet in their youth and radiant faith and capabilities for happiness. They seemed like children, and the tender bud of their lovely young passion was a thing to be cherished. He had seen such buds before, but he had never seen the flower.

"I'd like to see the flower," he used to say to himself. "To see it would pay a man for a good deal he'd missed himself. The pair of them could set up a pretty fair garden of Eden—serpents and apple-trees being excluded."

They were happy. Even when disappointments befell them and prospects were unpromising they were happy. They could look into each other's eyes and take comfort. Rupert's dark moods had melted away. He sometimes forgot they had ever ruled him. His old boyish craving for love and home was fed. The bare little rooms in the poor little house were home. Sheba and Tom were love and affection. When they sat at the table and calculated how much longer their diminishing store would last, even as it grew smaller and smaller, they could laugh over the sums they worked out on slips of paper. So long as the weather was warm enough they strolled about together in the fragrant darkness or sat in the creeper-hung porch, in the light of summer moons; when the cold nights came they sat about the stove or the table and talked, while Sheba sewed buttons on or worked assiduously at the repairing of her small wardrobe. Whatsoever she did, the two men sat and admired, and there was love and laughter.

The strenuous life which went on in the busier part of the town—the politics, the struggles, the plots and schemes, the worldly pleasures—seemed entirely apart from them.

Sometimes, after a day in which Judge Rutherford had been encouraged or Tom had had a talk with a friendly member who had listened to the story of the claim with signs of interest, they felt their star of hope rising; it never sinks far below the horizon when one's teens are scarcely of the past—and Sheba and Rupert spent a wonderful evening making plans for a future of ease and fortune.

At Judge Rutherford's suggestion, Tom had long sought an interview with a certain member of the Senate whose good word would be a carrying weight in any question under debate. He was a shrewd, honest, business-like man, and a personal friend of the President's. He was much pursued by honest and dishonest alike, and, as a result of experience, had become difficult to reach. On the day Tom was admitted to see him, he had been more than usually badgered. Just as Tom approached his door a little man opened it cautiously and slid out, with the air of one leaving within the apartment things not exhilarating on retrospect. He was an undersized country man, the cut of whose jeans wore a familiar air to Tom's eye even at a distance and before he lifted the countenance which revealed him as Mr. Stamps.

"We ain't a-gwine to do your job no good to-day, Tom," he said, benignly. "He'd 'a' kicked me out ef I hadn't 'a' bin small—jest same es you was gwine ter that time I come to talk to ye about Sheby. He's a smarter man than you be, an' he seed the argyment I hed to p'int out to you. Ye won't help your job none to-day!"

"I haven't got a 'job' in hand," Tom answered; "your herds of stock and the Judge's coal mines and cotton fields are different matters."

He passed on and saw that when his name was announced the Senator looked up from his work with a fretted movement of the head.

"Mr. De Willoughby of Talbot's Cross-roads?" he said. Tom bowed. He became conscious of appearing to occupy too much space in the room of a busy man who had plainly been irritated.

"I was told by Judge Rutherford that you had kindly consented to see me," he said.

The Senator tapped the table nervously with his pencil and pushed some papers aside.

"Well, I find I have no time to spare this morning," was his brutally frank response. "I have just been forced to give the time which might have been yours to a little hoosier who made his way in, heaven knows how, and refused to be ordered out. He had a claim, too, and came from your county and said he was an old friend of yours."

"He is not an old enemy," answered Tom. "There is that much foundation in the statement."

"Well, he has occupied the time I had meant to give you," said the Senator, "and I was not prepossessed either by himself or his claim."

"I think he's a man to gain a claim," said Tom; "I'm afraid I'm not."

"It is fair to warn you that I am not friendly to claims made by the families of men who lived in a hot-bed of secession," said the Senator. He had been badgered too much this morning, and this big, rather convincing looking applicant worried him. "I have an appointment at the White House in ten minutes."

"Then this is no place for me," said Tom. "No man is likely to be friendly to a thing he has no time to talk of. I will bid you good-morning."

"Good-morning," returned the Senator, brusquely.

Tom went away feeling that he was a blunderer. The fact was that he was a neophyte and, it was true, did not possess the qualities which make a successful lobbyist. Mr. Stamps had wheedled or forced his way into the great man's apartment and had persisted in remaining to press his claim until he was figuratively turned out by the shoulders. Big Tom had used only such means to obtain the interview as a gentleman might; he had waited until he was called to take his turn, and so had lost his chance. When he had found the Senator hurried and unwilling to spend time on him he had withdrawn at once, not feeling Mr. Stamps's method to be possible.

"I suppose I ought to have stayed and buttonholed him in spite of himself," he thought, ruefully. "I'm a greenhorn; I suppose a man in my place ought to stand his ground whether it's decent or indecent, and make people listen to what he has to say, and be quite willing to be kicked downstairs after he has said it. I'm a disgrace to my species—and I don't think much of the species."

As he was walking through one of the corridors he saw before him two men who were evidently visitors to the place. He gathered this from their leisurely movements and the interest with which they regarded the objects about them. They looked at pictures and remarked upon decorations. One was a man who was unusually well-built. He was tall and moved well and had lightly silvered hair; his companion was tall also, but badly hung together, and walked with a stoop of the shoulders.

Tom walked behind them for some yards before his attention was really arrested, but suddenly a movement of one man's head seemed to recall some memory of the past. He did not know what the memory was, but he knew vaguely that it was a memory. He followed a few yards further, wondering idly what had been recalled and why he should be reminded of the mountains and the pine-trees. Yes, it was the mountains and pine-trees—Hamlin County, but not the Hamlin County of to-day. Why not the Hamlin County of to-day? why something which seemed more remote? Confound the fellow; he had made that movement again. Tom wished he would turn his face that he might see it, and he hurried his footsteps somewhat that he might come within nearer range. The two men paused with their backs towards him, and Tom paused also. They were looking at a picture, and the taller of the two made a gesture with his hand. It was a long, bony hand, and as he extended it Tom slightly started. It all came back to him—the memory which had been recalled. He smelt the scent of the pines on the hillside; he saw the little crowd of mourners about the cabin door; inside, women sat with bent heads, upon two wooden chairs rested the ends of a slender coffin, and by it stood a man who lifted his hand and said to those about him: "Let us pray."

The years swept back as he stood there. He was face to face again with the tragic mystery which had seemed to end in utter silence. The man turned his face so that it was plainly to be seen—sallow, rugged, harsh in line. The same face, though older, and perhaps less tragic—the face of the man he had left alone in the awful, desolate stillness of the empty room.

The next moment he turned away again. He and his companion passed round a corner and were gone. Tom made no attempt to follow them.

"There is no reason why I should," was his thought, "either for Sheba's sake or his own. She is happy, and he feels his secret safe—whatsoever it may have been. Perhaps he has had time to outlive the misery of it, and it would all be brought to life again."

But the incident had been a shock. There was nothing to fear from it, he knew; but it had been a shock nevertheless. He did not know the man's name; he had never asked it. He was plainly one of the many strangers who, in passing through the Capital, went to visit the public buildings. The merest chance might have brought him to the place; the most ordinary course of events might take him away. Tom went back to Dupont Circle in a thoughtful mood. He forgot the claim and the Senator who had had no leisure to hear the statement of his case.

Rupert and Sheba were waiting for his return. Rupert had spent the afternoon searching for employment. He had spent many a long day in the same way and with the same result.

"They don't want me," he had said when he came home. "They don't want me anywhere, it seems—either in lawyers' offices or dry-goods stores. I have not been particular."

They had sat down and gazed at each other.

"I sometimes wonder," said Sheba, "what we shall do when all our money is gone—every penny of it. It cannot last long now. We cannot stay here and we cannot pay our way back to the mountains. What shall we do?"

"I shall go out every day till I find something to do," said Rupert, with the undiscouraged fervour of youth. "I am not looking for employment for a gentleman, in these days; I am looking for work—just as Uncle Matt is."

"He chopped some wood yesterday and brought home two dollars," Sheba said. "He made me take it. He said he wanted to pay his 'bode.'"

She laughed a little, but her eyes were wet and shining.

Rupert took her face between his hands and looked into it adoringly.

"Don't be frightened, Sheba," he said; "don't be unhappy. Lovely darling, I will take care of you."

She pressed her soft cheek against his hand.

"I know you will," she said, "and of Uncle Tom, too. I couldn't be unhappy—we all three love each other so. I do not believe we shall be unhappy, even if we are poor enough to be hungry."

So their moment of dismay ended in smiles. They were passing through a phase of life in which it is not easy to be unhappy. Somehow things always brightened when they drew near each other. His observation of this truth was one of Tom's pleasures. He knew the year of waiting had managed to fill itself with sweetness for them. Their hopes had been alternately raised and dashed to earth; one day it seemed not improbable that they were to be millionaires, the next that beggary awaited them after the dwindling of their small stock of money; but they had shared their emotions and borne their vicissitudes together.

When Tom entered the room they rose and met him with questioning faces.

"Was it good fortune?" they cried. "Did you see him, Uncle Tom? What did he say?"

He told his story as lightly as possible, but it could not be transformed, by any lightness of touch, into an encouraging episode. He made a picture of Stamps sidling through the barely opened door, and was terse and witty at the expense of his own discomfiture and consciousness of incompetence. He laughed at himself and made them laugh, but when he sat down in his accustomed seat there was a shade upon his face.

The children exchanged glances, the eyes of each prompting the other. They must be at their brightest. They knew the sight of their happiness warmed and lightened his heart always.

"He is tired and hungry," Sheba said. "We must give him a beautiful hot supper. Rupert, we must set the table."

They had grown used to waiting upon themselves, and their domestic services wore more or less the air of festivities. Sheba ran downstairs to Miss Burford's kitchen, where Uncle Matt had prepared the evening meal in his best manner. As the repasts grew more and more simple, Matt seemed to display greater accomplishments.

"It's all very well, Miss Sheba," he had said once, when she praised the skill with which he employed his scant resources. "It's mighty easy to be a good cook when you'se got everythin' right to han'. The giftness is to git up a fine table when you ain't got nuffin'. Dat's whar dish yer niggah likes to show out. De Lard knows I'se got too much yere dis ve'y minnit—to be a-doin' credit to my 'sperience—too much, Miss Sheba."

He was frying hoe-cake and talking to Miss Burford when Sheba came into the kitchen. He was a great comfort and aid to Miss Burford, and in a genteel way the old lady found him a resource in the matters of companionship and conversation. Her life was too pinched and narrow to allow her even the simpler pleasure of social intercourse, and Matt's journeys into the world, and his small adventures, and his comments upon politics and social events were a solace and a source of entertainment to her.

Just now he was describing to her the stories he had heard of a celebrated lecturer who had just arrived in the city.

"Whether he's a 'vivalist or jes' a plain preacher what folks is runnin' after, I cayn't quite make out, ma'am," he was saying. "I ain't quite thinkin' he's a 'vivalist, but de peoples is a-runnin' after him shore—an' seems like dey doin' it in ev'y city he goes to. Ev'ybody want to heah him—ev'ybody—rich en pore—young en ole. De Rev'end John Baird's his name, an' he's got a fren' travellin' with him as they say is like Jonathan was to David in dese yere ole Bible times. An' I heern tell ev when he rise in de pulpit de people's jest gets so worked up at what he preach to 'em—dey jest cries an' rocks de benches. Dat's what make me think he might be a 'vivalist—cos we all knows dat cryin' an' rockin' an' clappin' hands is what makes a 'vival." He was full of anecdotes concerning the new arrival whose reputation had plainly preceded him.

"He gwine ter preach nex' Sat'day on ''Pentance,'" he said to Sheba, with a chuckle. "Dat's his big lecture ev'ybody want to hear. De hall shore to be pack full. What I'm a-hopin' is dat it'll be pack full er Senators an' members er Congrest, an' he'll set some of 'em a-'pentin', dey ain't 'tend to dere business an' git people's claims through. Ef I know'd de gen'leman, I'd ax him to menshun dat special an' pertickler."

As they sat at supper, Sheba repeated his stories and comments. All the comments were worthy of repetition, and most of the anecdotes were suggestively interesting, illustrating, as they did, the power of a single man over many.

"I should like to go and hear him myself," she said. "Uncle Tom, have you anything to repent? Rupert, have you? Uncle Tom, you have not forgotten the Senator. You look at me as if you were thinking of something that was not happy."

"The Senator was not particularly happy," remarked Tom. "He had just had an interview with Stamps, and he certainly was not happy at the sight of me. He thought he had another on his hands. He's in better spirits by this time."

Sheba got up and went to his side of the table. She put her arms round his neck and pressed her cheek against his.

"Forget about him," she said.

"I am not remembering him particularly," said Tom, the shade passing from his eyes; "I am remembering you—as you were nineteen years ago."

"Nineteen years ago!" said Sheba. "I was a baby!"

"Yes," answered Tom, folding a big arm round her, and speaking slowly. "I saw a man to-day who reminded me of the day you were born. Are you glad you were born, Sheba? that's what I want to be sure of."

The two pairs of young eyes met glowing. Tom knew they had met, by the warmth of the soft cheek touching him.

"Yes, I am glad—I am glad—I am glad!" with grateful sweetness.

"And I—and I," cried Rupert. He sprung up and held out an impetuous boyish hand to Tom. "You know how glad, Uncle Tom—look at her—look at me—see how glad we both are; and it is you—you who have made it so."

"It's a pretty big thing," said Tom, "that two people should be glad they are alive." And he grasped the ardent hand as affectionately as it was offered.



CHAPTER XXXII

The Reverend John Baird and his friend the Reverend Lucien Latimer were lodged in a quiet house in a quiet street. The lecturing tour had been fatiguing, and Baird was glad of such repose as he could secure. In truth, the excitement and strain of his work, the journeying from place to place, the hospitalities from which he could not escape, had worn upon him. He had grown thinner, and often did not sleep well at night. He used to find himself lying awake repeating to himself mechanically words from his own lecture. "Repentance is too late," his voice would whisper to the darkness. "Repentance cannot undo."

His audiences found him an irresistible force. He had become more than the fashion of the hour; he was its passion. People liked to look at as well as to hear him. He was besieged by lion-hunters, overwhelmed with attentions in each town or city he visited. Reporters followed him, interviewers besought appointments, agreeable people invited him to their houses, intrusive people dogged him. Latimer stood between him and as many fatigues as he could. He transacted business for him, and interviewed interviewers; and he went to tiring functions.

"When I enter a room without you, and make your excuses, they must make the most of my black face; and they make the most of it, but they don't love me," he said. "Still it is a thing to be borne if it saves you when you need all your forces. What does it matter? I have never expected to be smiled at for my own sake as they smile at me for yours."

In these days of close companionship each found in each new qualities increasing the tie between them. Latimer felt himself fed by the public affection surrounding the man who was his friend. He was thrilled by the applause which thundered forth at his words; he was moved by the mere sense of his success, and the power he saw him unknowingly exercise through mere physical charm.

"I am nearer being a happy, or at least a peaceful, man than I had ever thought to be," he said to Baird; "your life seems to fill mine, and I am less lonely." Which was indeed a truth.

On the evening of the day on which big Tom had caught his glimpse of the two strangers in the corridor of the Capitol, Baird dined at the house of the Senator, whose adverse mood had promised such small encouragement to the De Willoughby claim. And in the course of the meal the host spoke of both claim and claimants.

"The man is a sort of Colossus," he said, "and he looked all the heavier and bigger because my last visitor had been the smallest and most insignificant of the hoosier type."

"Is this man a hoosier?" was asked.

"No. He has lived among the most primitive, and Rutherford tells me is a sort of county institution; but he is not a hoosier. He has a large, humane, humorous face, and a big, humorous, mellow voice. I should rather have liked the fellow, confound him, if I hadn't lost my patience before he came into the room."

"Did he tell you the story of the claim?" enquired his married daughter.

"No, I didn't let him. I was feeling pretty sick of claims, and I had no time."

"Oh, father, I wish you had let him tell it," exclaimed the pretty young woman. "The truth is, I am beginning to be interested in that claim myself. I am in love with Judge Rutherford and his stories of Jenny and Tom Scott. His whole soul is bound up in 'pushing this thing through'—that's what he calls it. He is the most delightful lobbyist I ever met. He is like a bull in a china shop—though I don't believe anyone ever saw a bull in a china shop."

"He does not know enough to give his friends a rest," said the Senator. "If he was not such a good fellow he would bore a man to death. He bores many a man as it is, and people in office won't stand being bored. He's too ingenuous. The shrewd ones say his ingenuousness is too good to be true. He can't keep De Willoughby's virtues out of his stories of him—and a man's virtues have nothing much to do with his claim."

"I met him in one of the squares yesterday," said Mrs. Meredith, "and he almost cried when he spoke of the claim. He told me that everything was going wrong—that it was being pushed aside by all sorts of things, and he had lost heart. His eyes and nose got quite red, and he had to wink hard to keep back the tears."

"The fellow believes in it, at any rate," said the Senator; "he has that to support him."

"He believes in everything," said Mrs. Meredith, "and it would have touched your heart to hear him talk about the claimants. There is a young nephew and a beautiful girl creature, who is big Mr. De Willoughby's adopted daughter. She is not a claimant, it is true, but they all adore each other, and the nephew is in love with her; and if the claim goes through they will be happy forever afterwards. I saw the nephew once, and he was a beautiful boy with Southern eyes and a charming expression. Upon the whole, I think I am in love with the young couple, too. Their story sounded like a pastoral poem when Judge Rutherford told it."

"Suppose you tell it to us, Marion," said the Senator, with a laugh, and a glance round the table. "It may appeal to our feelings and advance the interests of the claim."