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 lec