"That! that! Oh, my God! Then he can take her from me in my old age, from me who have reared her. He can take her, but he cannot love her as I have nor make her love him! I withheld the bit of land, my birthright, that he coveted, and this is my punishment!
"Pray and pray quickly, dominie; it isn't the dying of the body that must soon come that I fear; no, nor even the craziness that is reaching out after me. I'm losing my hold on believing! It's all slipping and slipping until I'm going down out of sight of Mary and little Marygold. Help me! Stephen Latimer, help me keep my faith! Not in the everyday prayers from books or Bible; I want something nearer, something said by some one that has lived and suffered in the times that I have!
"There on that card that hangs under his picture—He knew,—he suffered. I've pieced his words together for my need, and said them every day and night these many years. Now all is a blank, I can't remember them," and Gilbert fell upon his knees, his head covered by his arms, strangled with sobs.
Following where Gilbert pointed, Latimer saw an old calendar card hanging below Lincoln's portrait. Seizing it, he found on the reverse side Gilbert's crooked writing, and straightway kneeling beside him, one arm about his shoulders, he read this prayer:—
"'Keep us free from giving offence, O Lord; neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us do our duty as we understand it to the end.'
"'Both of us read the same Bible and pray to the same God. Each invokes His aid against the other. The prayers of both cannot be answered—Thine it is to choose between us.
"'Thou hast Thine own purposes. Woe unto the world because of offences, for it must needs be that offences come, but woe unto that man by whom the offence cometh." Through Thine aid keep us with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as it is given us to see the right; let us strive on to finish the work and to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with Thee, O God, for the sake of Him who suffered to teach us how to bear suffering.'"
After Latimer's voice ceased, there was again a long silence, as if each man prayed alone. Then Gilbert pulled himself slowly to his chair, and with hands clasped upon his knees to hide their trembling, he said clearly, as if reading his own death sentence over in order to become used to the sound of it:—
"I must not forget! She will go to her own home and father upon the hill—"
"Daddy!" came the cry from the open door. A rush across the room and Poppea was clinging to the old man, laughing and sobbing at the same time.