By some chance--though he alone realised the truth of the fact--the subjects of his most realistic and intense appeals to his hearers had the habit of developing themselves in his close talks with Latimer. Among the friends of the man on whom all things seemed to smile, the man on whom the sun had never shone, and who faithfully worshipped him, was known as his Shadow. It was not an unfitting figure of speech. Dark, gloomy, and inarticulate, he was a strange contrast to the man he loved; but, from the hour he had stood by Latimer's side, leaning against the rail of the returning steamer, listening to the monotonously related story of the man's bereavement, John Baird had felt that Fate herself had knit their lives together. He had walked the deck alone long hours that night, and when the light of the moon had broken fitfully through the stormily drifting clouds, it had struck upon a pallid face. "Poor fellow!" he had said between his teeth; "poor darkling, tragic fellow! I must try--try--oh, my God! I must try----" Then their lives had joined currents at Willowfield, and the friendship Baird had asked for had built itself on a foundation of stone. There was nothing requiring explanation in the fact that to the less fortunate man Baird's every gift of wit and ease was a pleasure and comfort. His mere physical attractions were a sort of joy. When Latimer caught sight of his own lank, ill-carried figure and his harshly rugged sallow face, he never failed to shrink from them and avert his eyes. To be the companion of a man whose every movement suggested strength and grace, whose skin was clear and healthful, his features well balanced and admirable in line--to be the friend of a human being built by nature as all human beings should be built if justice were done to them, was nourishment to his own starved needs. When he assumed his charge at the squalid little town of Janway's Mills, his flock looked askance at him. He was not harsh of soul, but he was gloomy and had not the power to convey encouragement or comfort, though he laboured with strenuous conscientiousness. Among the sordid commonness of the every-day life of the mill hands and their families he lived and moved as Savonarola had moved and lived in the midst of the picturesque wickedness and splendidly coloured fanaticism of Italy in dim, rich centuries past; but his was the asceticism and stern self-denial of Savonarola without the uplifting power of passionate eloquence and fire which, through their tempest, awakened and shook human souls. He had no gifts of compelling fervor; he could not arouse or warm his hearers; he never touched them. He preached to them, he visited them at their homes, he prayed beside their dying and their dead, he gave such aid in their necessities as the narrowness of his means would allow, but none of them loved him or did more than stoically accept him and his services.