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Updated: June 28, 2025
The world had heard and talked much of the Reverend John Baird in the years which followed his return to Willowfield. During the first few months after his reappearance among them, his flock had passed through a phase of restless uncertainty with regard to him. Certain elder members of his congregation had privately discussed questions of doctrine with anxiousness.
She had never met a man whom she could have loved, who would have loved her, and she was essentially though Willowfield would never have dreamed it a woman who should have loved and mated. A lifetime of narrow, unstimulating years and thwarted instincts had made age treat her ill. She was a thin woman with burning eyes, and a personality people were afraid of.
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.
He was ill for months, and he rose from his sick-bed a depressed shadow of his former self and quite unable to think of returning to his charge, even if his old desire had not utterly left him with his fever. He was absent from Willowfield for two years, and when at length he turned his face homeward, it was with no eagerness.
Willowfield looked forward with trepidation to the time when the great world which stood ready to give him fame would absorb him altogether, but in the meantime it exerted all its power of fascination, and was so far successful that the Reverend John Baird felt that his lines had indeed fallen in pleasant places.
She saw but little of him for two months, and then he was called across the Atlantic by his wife's illness and left the place. "Write to me now and then," he said, when he came to bid her good-bye. "What can I write about from Willowfield to a man in Paris?" she asked. "About Willowfield," he answered, holding her hand and laughing a little gruesomely.
She had always found an interest in John Baird. When he had come to Willowfield she had seen in him that element which her whole long life had lacked. His emotional potentialities had wakened her imagination.
Just at that time the mill hands gossiped a good deal about Willowfield, because the Reverend John Baird was said to be going to Europe. That led to talk on the subject of other Willowfield people, and the Latimers among them. In the rare, brief letters Margery wrote to her protégée, she did not say she was ill.
Who's Latimer?" "Latimer!" Miss Amory echoed, "you ought to know him. His family lives in Willowfield. He is the man who was coming home to take charge of the little church at Janway's Mills. He has evidently crossed the Atlantic with them." "Well, now, I declare," proclaimed Mrs. Stornaway. "It must be the man who took his sister to Europe. It was a kind of absurd thing.
His journey had somewhat fatigued him, and he was in the physical and mental condition to feel glad that this lecture was to be the last of the series. He was going back to Willowfield, though he was not to remain there. He had received a call from an important church in New York and had accepted it. He was endeavouring to make arrangements that Latimer could be near him.
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