“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!”