t."

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 desperatel