ee and flung Baird across the room. He set the pistol against
his heart and pulled the trigger. He gave something like a leap and fell
down.

The door opened for the returning member of the committee and the
impatient applause of the audience came through it almost a roar.

Baird was struggling to rise as if his fall had stunned him. Latimer was
stretched at full length, quite dead.

CHAPTER XL

Tom walked up the staircase pondering deeply. The De Willoughby claim was
before the House. Judge Rutherford was making his great speech, and the
chief claimant might have been expected to be sitting breathless in one
of the galleries. But he was not. He was going to Baird, who had sent for
him, and Baird was sitting in the room in which Latimer lay dead with a
bullet in his heart. He had been sitting there for hours, and when Tom
had arrived at the house he had been told that Baird had asked that he
should be taken to him in the death-chamber. He was sitting on a chair by
the bed on which Latimer was stretched, rigid with a still face, which
looked like a mask of yellow wax, appearing above the exceeding freshness
of the turned-down linen sheet. Baird did not move as Tom entered, but
continued to gaze at the dread thing with dull, drooping eyes. Tom went
to him and laid his hand on his shoulder. He saw the man was stupefied.

"There's nothing to say, Baird," he said after a silence, "when it comes
to this."

"There is something for me to say," Baird answered, very quietly. "I want
to say it before him, while he lies there. I wonder if he will hear?"

"He may."

"It would not do any good to anyone if he did," Baird said. "The
blackness of it all lies in that--that he would not be helped, she would
not be helped--I should not."

"She?" said Tom.

Baird got up at once, stiffly and unsteadily. He stood upright, the
lithe-limbed slender form, which was so much admired upon the platform,
held rigidly. His face looked lined and haggard.

"No other man shall feel an affection for me--I think you are beginning
to feel an affection for me--under a false impression. That man loved me
for long years, and I loved him. I think I helped him to something that
was as near happiness as his nature would allow him to feel. God knows I
owed it to him. I was one of those who repented too late. That is why I
have preached of repentance. I have done it with a secret, frenzied
hope."

"Did he know your reason?" asked Tom.

"Not