ing hands and lips and childish, terrified eyes. I can feel
her convulsive little fingers clutching my feet, and her face--her
face--lying upon them when she fell down."

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXXIV

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

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