sweetness which win
affection. The smile in her eyes wakened an answer even in the look of
passing strangers. Suddenly all had changed. She was hidden in the
darkness, crushed and shamed, an outcast and a pariah--a thing only to be
kept out of sight. Sometimes, after she had been sitting lost in thought,
Latimer had seen her look up bewildered, glance at her little, deformed
body, and sit white and trembling.

"Everything is different," she panted out once. "It is as if all the
world was black. It is--because--because I am black!"

Latimer had made no effort to wring from her the name she had prayed to
be allowed to hide; yet he had often wondered that in some hysteric
moment it had not escaped her--that mere helpless anguish did not betray
her into uttering some word or phrase which might have served as a clue.
But this she had never done, and between them there had been built a
stone wall of silence. Yet, in spite of it, he had known that her young
heart was broken with love for this nameless traitor--a love which would
not die. He had seen it in the woe of her eyes, in the childlike longing
of her look when she sat and gazed out over the wild beauty of the land,
thinking she was unobserved. In his own soul there had been black, bitter
hate, but in hers only loneliness and pain.

There came back to him--and he sprang up and ground his teeth, pacing the
floor as he remembered it--a night when she had wandered out alone in the
starlight, and at last he had followed her and found her--though she did
not know he was near--standing where the roof of pine-trees made a
darkness, and as he stood within four feet of her he had heard her cry to
the desolate stillness:

"If I could see you once! If I could see you once--if I could touch
you--if I could hear you speak--just once--just once!"

And she had wailed it low--but as a starving child might cry for bread.
And he had turned and gone away, sick of soul, leaving her.

He had told this to Baird, and had seen the muscles of his face twitch
and his eyes suddenly fill with tears. He had left his seat and crossed
the room to conceal his emotion, and Latimer had known that he did not
speak because he could not.

The letters were written with caution, Stamps had said, and the mention
of names had been avoided in them; and, though he ground his teeth again
as he thought of this, he realised that the knowledge brought by a name
would be of no value to him. Long ago he had sai