The door opened, and the member of the committee looked in again, radiant
with exultation.

"The audience waiting in such breathless silence that you might hear a
pin drop. Two thousand of them, if there's one. Ten minutes to eight."

"Thank you," answered Baird.

The door closed again and he stood looking at Latimer's rigid hand and
the papers.

"They were written to Margery," went on Latimer. "Stamps found them in a
chink in the logs. She had hidden them there that she might take them out
and sob over and kiss them. I used to hear her in the middle of the
night."

Baird snatched them from his hand. He fell into a chair near the table
and dropped his face upon the yellowed fragments, pressing them against
his lips with awful sobbing sounds, as if he would wrest from them the
kisses the long-dead girl had left there.

"I, too!" he cried. "I, too! Oh! my God! Margery!"

"Don't say 'God!'" said Latimer. "When she was dying, in an agony of
fear, she said it. Not that word! Another!"

He said no other--and Latimer drew nearer to him.

"You wrote them," he said. "They are written in your hand--in your
words--I should know them anywhere. You may deny it. I could prove
nothing. I do not want to prove anything. Deny it if you will."

Baird rose unsteadily. The papers were clutched in his hand. His face was
marred by the unnaturalness of a man's tears.

"Do you think I shall deny it?" he answered. "It is true. I have sat and
listened to your talk of her and thought I should go quite mad. You have
told me of her tortures, and I have listened. I did not know--surely she
did not know herself--of the child--when I went away. It is no use saying
to you--how should it be?--that I loved her--that I was frenzied by my
love of her innocent sweetness!"

"No, there is no use," answered Latimer, in a voice actually void of
emotion, "but I daresay it is true."

"There is no use in calling myself by any of the names invented for the
men who bring about such tragedies. They are true of some men perhaps,
but they were not true of me. I don't know what was true of me. Something
worse than has ever been put into words perhaps, for I loved her and I
have loved her for twenty years. I would have given up my career--my
life, anything she had asked!"

"But when she found you had acted a lie to her----"

"It seemed to fill her with the frantic terror of a child. I dare not
approach her. I think she thought she would be struck dead