"I thought too much," he said. "I don't know how it was. But just at that time there was a miserable story going on at the mills--I used to see the poor girl day by day--and hear the women talk. You know how that class of woman talks and gives you details and enlarges on them? The girl was about Margery's age. I don't know how it was; but one day, as I was standing listening to a gossipping married woman in one of their squalid, respectable parlours, and she was declaiming and denouncing and pouring forth anecdotes, suddenly--quite suddenly--I felt as if something had struck me. I turned sick and white and had to sit down. Oh, God! what an afternoon that was! and how long it seemed before I got back home." He stopped again. This time he wiped sweat from his forehead before he continued, hoarsely: "I cannot go over it--I cannot describe the steps by which I was led to--horrid fear. For two weeks I did not sleep a single night. I thought I was going mad. I laid awake making desperate plans--to resort to in case--in case----!" His forehead was wet again, and he stopped to touch it with his handkerchief. "One day I told my mother I was going to Boston to see Margery--to talk over the possibility of our going abroad together with the money I had worked for and saved. I had done newspaper work--I had written religious essays--I had taught. I went to her." It was Baird who broke the thread of his speech now. He had been standing before a window, his back to the room. He turned about. "You found?" he exclaimed, low and unsteady. "You found----?" "It was true," answered Latimer. "The worst." Baird stood stock still; if Latimer had been awake to externals he would have seen that it was because he could not move--or speak. He was like a man stunned. Latimer continued: "She was sitting in her little room alone when I entered it. She looked as if she had been passing through hours of convulsive sobbing. She sat with her poor little hands clutching each other on her knees. Hysteric shudders were shaking her every few seconds, and her eyes were blinded with weeping. A child who had been beaten brutally might have sat so. She was too simple and weak to bear the awful terror and woe. She was not strong enough to conceal what there was to hide. She did not even get up to greet me, but sat trembling like an aspen leaf." "What did you say to her?" Baird cried out. "I only remember as one remembers a nightmare," the other man answered, passing his hand over his brow. "It was a black nightmare. I saw before I spoke, and I began to shake as she was shaking. I sat down before her and took both her hands. I seemed to hear myself saying, 'Margery--Margery, don't be frightened--don't be afraid of Lucian. I will help you, Margery; I have come to talk to you--just to talk to you.' That was all. And she fell upon the floor and lay with her face on my feet, her hands clutching them."