onished. Scarcely a year
afterward she became Mrs. Baird, and people said she was a very fortunate
girl, which was possibly true.

Her husband did not share the fate of most ministers who had presided
over Mrs. Stornaway's church. His power over his congregation increased
every year. His name began to be known in the world of literature; he was
called upon to deliver in important places the lectures he had delivered
to his Willowfield audiences, and the result was one startling triumph
after another. There was every indication of the fact that a career was
already marked out for him.

Willowfield looked forward with trepidation to the time when the great
world which stood ready to give him fame would absorb him altogether, but
in the meantime it exerted all its power of fascination, and was so far
successful that the Reverend John Baird felt that his lines had indeed
fallen in pleasant places.

But after the birth of her little daughter his wife was not strong, and
was so long in regaining vitality that in the child's second year she was
ordered abroad by the physician. At this time Baird's engagements were
such that he could not accompany her, and accordingly he remained in
America. The career was just opening up its charmed vistas to him; his
literary efforts were winning laurels; he was called upon to lecture in
Boston and New York, and he never rose before an audience without at once
awakening an enthusiasm.

Mrs. Baird went to the south of France with her child and nurse and a
party of friends, and remained there for a year. At the termination of
that time, just as she thought of returning home, she was taken seriously
ill. Her husband was sent for and went at once to join her. In a few
months she had died of rapid decline. She had been a delicate girl, and a
far-off taint of consumption in her family blood had reasserted itself.
But though Mrs. Stornaway bewailed her with diffuse and loud pathos and
for a year swathed her opulence of form in deepest folds and draperies of
crape, the quiet fairness and slightness which for some five and twenty
years had been known as Agnes Stornaway, had been a personality not
likely to be a marked and long-lingering memory.

The child was placed with a motherly friend in Paris. For a month after
his wife's death Baird had been feverishly, miserably eager to return to
America. Those about him felt that the blow which had fallen upon him
might affect his health seriously. He se