"I have heard and thought of her until she has become a living creature," John Baird said. "I hear of her from others than yourself. Miss Starkweather--that poor girl from the mills, Susan Chapman--you yourself--keep her before me, alive. I seem to know the very deeps of her lovingness--and understand her. Oh, that she should have _died_!" He turned his face away and spoke his next words slowly and in a lowered voice. "If I had found her when I came back free--if I had found her here, living--we two might have been brothers." "No, no!" Latimer cried, rising. "You--it could not----" He drew his hand across his forehead and eyes. "What are we saying?" he exclaimed, stammeringly. "What are we thinking of? For a moment it seemed as if she were alive again. Poor little Margery, with her eyes like blue flowers, she has been dead years and years and years." * * * * * It was not long after this that the Reverend John Baird startled a Boston audience one night by his lecture, "Repentance." In it he unfolded a new passionate creed which produced the effect of an electric shock. Newspapers reported it, editorials discussed it, articles were written upon it in monthly magazines. "Repentance is too late," was the note his deepest fervour struck with virile, almost terrible, intensity. "Repent before your wrong is done." "Repentance comes too late," he cried. "We say a man saves his soul by it--_his_ soul! We are a base, cowardly lot. Our own souls are saved--yes! And we hug ourselves and are comforted. But what of the thing we have hurt--for no man ever lost his soul unless he lost it by the wound he gave another--by inflicting in some other an agony? What of the one who has suffered--who has wept blood? I repent and save _myself_; but repentance cannot undo. The torture has been endured--the tears of blood shed. It is not to God I must kneel and pray for pardon, but to that one whose helplessness I slew, and, though he grant it me, he still has been slain."