"Are you going to kill me?" he said. "You know I asked you that once before." "No," said Latimer, "I am not going to kill you. I am going to kill the man who loved you, and found you his reason for living. It's all done with!" "No! no!" shrieked Baird, and he hurled himself across the table like a madman. "No! You are not! No, Latimer! No! God! No!" They were struggling together--Baird hung to his arm and tried to drag the pistol from his grasp. But it was no use; Latimer's long, ill-hung limbs were the stronger. His fixed face did not change, but he wrenched himself free and flung Baird across the room. He set the pistol against his heart and pulled the trigger. He gave something like a leap and fell down. The door opened for the returning member of the committee and the impatient applause of the audience came through it almost a roar. Baird was struggling to rise as if his fall had stunned him. Latimer was stretched at full length, quite dead. CHAPTER XL Tom walked up the staircase pondering deeply. The De Willoughby claim was before the House. Judge Rutherford was making his great speech, and the chief claimant might have been expected to be sitting breathless in one of the galleries. But he was not. He was going to Baird, who had sent for him, and Baird was sitting in the room in which Latimer lay dead with a bullet in his heart. He had been sitting there for hours, and when Tom had arrived at the house he had been told that Baird had asked that he should be taken to him in the death-chamber. He was sitting on a chair by the bed on which Latimer was stretched, rigid with a still face, which looked like a mask of yellow wax, appearing above the exceeding freshness of the turned-down linen sheet. Baird did not move as Tom entered, but continued to gaze at the dread thing with dull, drooping eyes. Tom went to him and laid his hand on his shoulder. He saw the man was stupefied. "There's nothing to say, Baird," he said after a silence, "when it comes to this." "There is something for me to say," Baird answered, very quietly. "I want to say it before him, while he lies there. I wonder if he will hear?" "He may." "It would not do any good to anyone if he did," Baird said. "The blackness of it all lies in that--that he would not be helped, she would not be helped--I should not." "She?" said Tom. Baird got up at once, stiffly and unsteadily. He stood upright, the lithe-limbed slender form, which was so much admired upon the platform, held rigidly. His face looked lined and haggard. "No other man shall feel an affection for me--I think you are beginning to feel an affection for me--under a false impression. That man loved me for long years, and I loved him. I think I helped him to something that was as near happiness as his nature would allow him to feel. God knows I owed it to him. I was one of those who repented too late. That is why I have preached of repentance. I have done it with a secret, frenzied hope."