Ann sat sewing by the table on which she kept her supply of beer. She could not afford to lose her sales to-day, although she knew bitterly that most of those who turned in for a drink did so out of prying curiosity. Even Christa, not very quick of feeling, had felt this, and had retired to lounge on the bed in the inner room with a paper novel. Christa usually spent her afternoon in preparing some cheap finery to wear in the cool of the evening, but she felt the family disgrace and Ann's severity, and was disheartened. As Ann bided her time and considered her own occupation and Christa's, she marvelled at the audacity of the promise which she had offered to give Bart, yet so awful was the question at stake that her only wish was that he had accepted it.

At four o'clock in the afternoon she roused Christa and apportioned a certain bit of work to her. There was a young man in Fentown called David Brown, a comely young fellow, belonging to one of the richer families of the place. He was good-natured, and an athlete; he had of late fallen into the habit of dropping in frequently to drink Ann's beer. She felt no doubt that Christa was his attraction. Some weeks before he had boasted that he had found the bed of a creek which made its way through the drowned forest, and that by it he had paddled his canoe through the marsh that lay to the north of the lake. He had also boasted that he had a secret way of finding the creek again. Upon considering his character Ann believed that although the statement was given boastfully it was true. Brown had a trace of Indian blood in him, and possessed the faculties of keen observation and good memory. It was by the help of this secret that she had hoped to extricate her father herself. There was still a chance that she might be able to use it.

"Some men think the world and all of a woman if they can only get into the notion that she is ill-used. David may be more sweet on you than ever," said Ann to Christa. "Put on your white frock: it's a little mussed, so it won't look as if you were trying to be fine; don't put on any sash, but do your hair neatly."

She will look taking enough, thought Ann to herself; she did not despise herself for the stratagem. It was part of the hard, practical game that she had played all her life, for that matter; she was not conscious of loving Christa any more than she was conscious of loving her father. It was merely her will that they should have the utmost advantage in life that she could obtain for them. Nothing short of a moral revolution could have changed this determination in her.

When Christa had performed her toilet, obeying Ann from mere habit, Ann drilled her in the thing she was to do. Brown would of course suspect what this information was to be used for. Christa was to coax him to promise secrecy. Ann went over the details of the plan again and again, until she was quite sure that the shallow forgetful child understood the importance of her mission.

Christa sat with her elbows on the table and cried a little. Her fair hair was curled low over her eyes, the coarse white dress hung limp but soft, leaving her neck bare. With all her motions her head nodded on her slender graceful neck, like a flower which bows on its stalk.

Before this disaster Christa had spent her life laughing; that had been more becoming to her than sullenness and tears. For all that, Ann was not sorry that Christa's eyelids should be red when David Brown was seen slowly lounging toward the window.

He had not been to see them the day before; it was apparent from his air that he thought it was not quite the respectable thing to do to-day. He tried to approach the house with a nonchalant, happen-by-chance air, so that if any one saw him they would suppose his stopping merely accidental.

Ann poured out his beer. Christa looked at him with eyes full of reproach. Then she got up and went away to the doorstep, and stood looking out. To the surprise of both of them, David did not follow her there. He stood still near Ann.

"It's hard on Christa," said Ann with a sigh; "she has been crying all day. Every one will desert us now, and we shall have to live alone without friends."

"Oh no" (abruptly); "nobody blames you."

"I don't mind for myself so much; I don't care so much about what people think, or how they treat me." She lifted her head proudly as she spoke. "But" (with pathos) "it's hard on Christa."

"No; you never think of yourself, do you?" David giggled a little as he said it, betraying that he felt his words to be unusually personal. Ann wondered for a minute what could be the cause of this giggle, and then she returned to the subject of Christa's suffering.

"Look here," he interrupted, "if there's any little thing I can do to help you, like lending you money if you're left hard up, or anything of that sort, you know" (he was blushing furiously now), "it's for you I'd do it," he blurted out. "I don't care about Christa."

"The silly fellow!" thought Ann. She was six years older than he, and she felt herself to be twenty years older. She entirely scorned his admiration in its young folly; but she did not hesitate a moment to make use of it. All her life had been a long training in that thrift which utilised everything for family gain. She was a thorough woman of society, this girl who sat in her backwoods cottage selling beer.

She looked at the boy, and a sudden glow of sensibility appeared in her face. "Oh, David!" she said; "I thought it was Christa."

"But it isn't Christa," he stammered, grinning. He was hugely pleased with the idea that she had accepted his declaration of courtship.

Half an hour later and Ann had the secret of the new track through the north of the drowned forest, and Brown had the wit not to ask her what she wanted to do with it. He had done more—he had offered to row her boat for her, but this Ann had refused.

It was a curious thing, this refusal. It arose purely from principle on her part; she had come to the limit which the average mind sets to the evil it will commit. She deceived and cajoled the boy without scruple, but she did not allow him to break the law. She remembered that he had parents who valued his good name more than he had as yet learned to value it. He was young; he was in her power; and she declined his further help.

Christa had wandered down the grass to the river-side and stood there pouting meanwhile.



CHAPTER VIII.

This incident with David Brown and the getting possession of his chart was the one stimulant that helped Ann to endure this long day of inactivity. It was like a small thimbleful of wine to one who longed for a generous draught; there was nothing else to do but to wait, alert for all chances that might help her. Evening closed in; the sisters were left alone. Christa returned indolently to lounging upon the bed and reading her novel. If Ann had had less strength, she would have paced the floor of the outer room in impatience; as it was she sat still by the table which held the beer and stitched her seam diligently. About eight o'clock she heard Toyner's step.

Was he going to haunt the house again in order to keep her from going out of it?

He came up to the door and came in.

She was preparing herself to act just as if she did not know who had come, and did not take much notice of him; but when he came up and she looked at his face in the lamp-light, she saw written in it the struggle that he had gone through. Its exact nature and detail she was incapable of conceiving, but one glance proved to her its reality. She was struck by the consciousness of meeting an element in life which was wholly new to her. When such a thing forces itself upon our attention, however indefinite and unexpressed may be our thought, it is an experience never to be forgotten. Ann fought against her conviction. She began at once, as intelligent humanity always does, to explain away what she did not understand, supposing by that means that she could do away with its existence.

"I think you are ill, Bart," she said quickly. "It looks to me as if you were in for a bout of chills; and enough to give it to you too, hanging about in the woods all night."

He drew a chair close to the table and sat down beside her.

"There isn't any chills in the swamps about here," he said; "they are as wholesome as dry land is." She saw by this that he had no intention of upbraiding her with his fall, or of proclaiming the object of his visit. She wanted to rouse him into telling her something.

"I heard them saying something about you to-day that I didn't believe a bit. I heard you were in the saloon drinking."

He took hold of the end of her seam, passed his finger along it as if examining the fabric and the stitches. "I took one glass," he said, with the curious quiet gravity which lay to-night like a spell upon all his words and actions.

"Well," she said cheerily, "I don't believe in a man making a slave of himself, not to take a glass when he wants it just because he sometimes makes a beast of himself by taking more than he ought."

"If you choose to think black is white, Ann, it will not make it that way."

"That's true," she replied compliantly; "and you've got more call to know than I have, for I've never 'been there.'"

"God forbid!" he said with sudden intensity. All the habits of thought of the last year put strength into his words. "If I thought you ever could be 'there,' Ann, it's nothing to say that I'd die to save you from it."

She let her thought dwell for a moment upon the picture of herself as a drunkard which had caused such intense feeling in him. "I am not worth his caring what becomes of me in that way," she thought to herself. It was the first time it ever occurred to her to think that she was unworthy of the love he had for her; but at the same moment she felt a shadow extinguish the rays of hope she had begun to feel, for she believed, as Bart did, that his piety was in direct opposition to the help he might otherwise give her. She had begun to hope that piety had loosened its grasp upon him for the time.

"I don't know what's to become of us, Christa and me," she said despairingly; "if we don't take to drink it will be a wonder, everybody turning the cold shoulder on us."

This was not her true thought at all. She knew herself to be quite incapable of the future she suggested, but the theme was excellently adapted to work upon his feelings.

"I'm going away to-night, Ann," he said; "perhaps I won't see you again for a long time; but you know all that you said you would promise last night——"

Her heart began to beat so sharply against her side with sudden hope, and perhaps another feeling to which she gave no name, that her answer was breathless. "Yes," she said eagerly, "if——"

He went on gravely: "I am going to start to-night in a row-boat for The Mills. You can tell me where your father is, and on my way I'll do all I can to help him to get away. It won't be much use perhaps. It is most likely that he will only get away from this locality to be arrested in another, but all that one man can do to help him I will do; but you'll have to give me the promise first, and I'll trust you to keep it."

Ann said nothing. The immediate weight of agonised care for her father's life was lifted off her; but she had a strange feeling that the man who had taken her responsibility had taken upon him its suffering too in a deeper sense than she could understand. It flashed across her, not clearly but indistinctly, that the chief element in her suffering had been the shame of defying law and propriety rather than let her father undergo a just penalty. In some way or other this had been all transferred to Bart, and in the glimmering understanding of his character which was growing within her, she perceived that he had it in him to suffer under it far more intensely than she had suffered. It was very strange that just when she obtained the promise she wanted from him she would have been glad to set him free from it!

Within certain self-pleasing limits Ann had always been a good-natured and generous person, and she experienced a strong impulse of this good nature and generosity just now, but it was only for a moment, and she stifled it as a thing that was quite absurd. Her father must be relieved, of course, from his horrid situation; and, after all, Bart could help him quite easily, more easily than any other man in the world could, and then come back and go on with his life as before. Questions of conscience had never, so far, clouded Ann's mental horizon. A moment's effort to regain her habitual standpoint made it quite clear to her that in this case it was she, she and Christa, who were making the sacrifice; a minute more, and she could almost have found it in her heart to grumble at the condition of the vow which she had so liberally sketched the night before, and only the fact that there was something about Bart which she did not at all understand, and a fear that that something might be a propensity to withdraw from his engagement, made her submissively adhere to it.

"Christa and I will sign the pledge. We will give up dancing and wearing finery. We will stop being friends with worldly people, and we will go to church and meetings, and try to like them." Ann repeated her vow.

Bart took the pen and ink with which she chronicled her sales of beer and wrote the vow twice on two pages of his note-book; at the bottom he added, "God helping me." Ann signed them both, he keeping one and giving her the other.

This contract on Ann's part had many of the elements of faith in it—a wonderful audacity of faith in her own power to revolutionise her life and control her sister's, and all the unreasoning child-likeness of faith which could launch itself boldly into an unknown future without any knowledge of what life would be like there.

On the part of Toyner the contract showed the power that certain habits of thought, although exercised only for a few months, had over him. Good people are fond of talk about the weakness of good habits compared with the strength of bad ones. But, given the same time to the formation of each, the habits which a man counts good must be stronger than those which he counts evil, because the inner belief of his mind is in unity with them. Toyner believed to-night that he was in open revolt against a rule of life which he had found himself unable to adhere to, and against the God who had ordained it; but, all the same, it was this rule, and faith in the God which he had approached by means of it, that actuated him during this conference with Ann. As a man who had given up hope for himself might desire salvation for his child, so he gravely and gently set her feet in what he was accustomed to regard as the path of life before he himself left it.



CHAPTER IX.

Ann's plan of the way in which Toyner more than any other man could aid her father was simple enough. He who was known to be in pursuit of Markham was to take him as a friend through the town at The Mills and start him on the road at the other side. Markham was little known at The Mills, and no one would be likely to take the companion of the constable to be the criminal for whose arrest he had been making so much agitation; they were to travel at the early hour of dawn when few were stirring. This plan, with such modifications as his own good sense suggested, Toyner was willing to adopt.

He started earlier in the evening than she had done, having no particular desire for secrecy. He told his friends that he was going to row to The Mills by night, and those who heard him supposed that he had gained some information concerning Markham that he thought it best to report. It was a calm night; the smoke of distant burning was still in the air.

He dropped down the river in the dark hours before the moonrise, and began to row with strength, as Ann had done, when he reached the placid water. His boat was light and well built. He could see few yards of dark water in advance; he could see the dark outline of the trees. The water was deep; there were no rocks, no hidden banks; he did not make all the haste he could, but rowed on meditatively—he was always more or less attracted by solitude. To-night the mechanical exercise, the darkness, the absolute loneliness, were greater rest to him than sleep would have been. In a despairing dull sort of way he was praying all the time; his mind had contracted a habit of prayer, at least if expressing his thoughts to the divine Being in the belief that they were heard may be called prayer.

Probably no one so old or so wise but that he will behave childishly if he can but feel himself exactly in the same relation to a superior being that a child feels to a grown man. Toyner expressed his grievance over and over again with childlike simplicity; he explained to God that he could not feel it to be right or fair that, when he had prayed so very much, and prayers of the sort to which a blessing was promised, he should be given over to the damning power of circumstance, launched in a career of back-sliding, and made thereby, not only an object of greater scorn to all men than if he had never reformed, but actually, as it appeared to him, more worthy of scorn.

He did not expect his complaints to be approved by the Deity, and gained therefore no satisfying sense that the prayer had ascended to heaven.

The moon arose, the night was very warm; into the aromatic haze a mist was arising from the water on all sides. It was not so thick but that he could see his path through it in the darkness; but when the light came he found a thin film of vapour between him and everything at which he looked. The light upon it was so great that it seemed to be luminous in itself, and it had a slightly magnifying power, so that distances looked greater, objects looked larger, and the wild desolate scene with which he was familiar had an aspect that was awful because so unfamiliar.

When Toyner realised what the full effect of the moonlight was going to be, he dropped his oars and sat still for a few minutes, wondering if he would be able to find the landmarks that were necessary, so strange did the landscape look, so wonderful and gigantic were the shapes which the dead trees assumed. Then he continued his path, looking for a tree that was black and blasted by lightning. He was obliged to grope his way close to the trees; thus his boat bumped once or twice on hidden stumps. It occurred to him to think what a very lonely place it would be to die in, and a premonition that he was going to die came across him.

Having found the blasted tree, he counted four fallen trees; they came at intervals in the outer row of standing ones; then there was a break in the forest, and he turned his boat into it and paused to listen.

The sound that met his ear—almost the strangest sound that could have been heard in that place—was that of human speech; it was still some distance away, but he heard a voice raised in angry excitement, supplicating, threatening, defying, and complaining.

Toyner began to row down the untried water-way which was opened to his boat. The idea that any one had found Markham in such a place and at such an hour was too extraordinary to be credited. Toyner looked eagerly into the mist. He could see nothing but queer-shaped gulfs of light between trunks and branches. Again his boat rubbed unexpectedly against a stump, and again the strange premonition of approaching death came over him. For a moment he thought that his wisest course would be to return. Then he decided to go forward; but before obeying this command, his mind gave one of those sudden self-attentive flashes the capacity for which marks off the mind of the reflective type from others. He saw himself as he sat there, his whole appearance and dress; he took in his history, and the place to which that hour had brought him, he, Bart Toyner, a thin, somewhat drooping, middle-aged man, unsuccessful, because of his self-indulgence, in all that he had attempted, yet having carried about with him always high desires, which had never had the slightest realisation except in the one clear shining space of vision and victory which had been his for a few months and now was gone. The light had mocked him; now perhaps he was going to die!

He pushed his boat on, his sensations melting into an excited blank of thought in which curiosity was alone apparent. He was growing strangely excited after his long calm despondency; no doubt the excitement of the other, who was shouting and jabbering not far away in the moonlit night, affected him.

He found his way through the trees of the opening; evidently the splash of his oar was caught by the owner of the noisy voice, for before he could see any one a silence succeeded to the noise, a sudden absolute silence, in itself shocking.

"Are you there, Markham?" cried Toyner.

No answer.

Toyner peered into the silver mist on all sides of him; the sensation of the diffused moonlight was almost dazzling, the trees looked far away, large and unreal. At length among them he saw the great log that had fallen almost horizontal with the water; upon it a solitary human figure stood erect in an attitude of frenzied defiance.

"I have come from your daughter, Markham." Then in a moment, by way of self-explanation, he said, "Toyner."

The man addressed only flung a clenched fist into the air. The silence of his pantomime now that there was some one to speak to was made ghastly by the harangue which he had been pouring out upon the solitude.

"Have you lost your head?" asked Toyner. "I have come from your daughter—I'm not going to arrest you, but set you down at The Mills—you can go where you will then."

He knew now the answer to his first question. The man before him was in some stage of delirium. Toyner wondered if any one could secretly have brought him drink.

There was nothing to be done but to soothe as best he could the other's fear and enmity, and to bring the boat close to the tree for him to get in it. Whether he was sane or mad, it was clearly necessary to take him from that place. Markham retained a sullen silence, but seemed to understand so far that he ceased all threatening gestures. His only movements were certain turnings and sudden crouchings as if he saw or felt enemies about him in the air.

"Now, get in," said Toyner. He had secured the boat. He pulled the other by the legs, and guided him as he slipped from his low bench. "Sit down; you can't stand, you know."

But Markham showed himself able to keep his balance, and alert to help in pushing off the boat. There was a heavy boat-pole ready for use in shallow water, and Markham for a minute handled it adroitly, pushing off from his tree.

Toyner turned his head perforce to see that the boat was not proceeding towards some other dangerous obstacle. Then Markham, with the sudden swift cunning of madness, lifted the butt end of his pole and struck him on the head.

Toyner sank beneath the blow as an ox shivers and sinks under the well-aimed blow of the butcher.

Markham looked about him for a moment with an air of childish triumph, looked not alone at the form of the fallen man before him, but all around in the air, as if he had triumphed not over one, but over many.

No eye was there to see the look of fiendish revenge that flitted next over the nervous working of his face. Then he fell quickly to work changing garments with the limp helpless body lying in the bottom of the boat. With unnatural strength he lifted Toyner, dressed in his own coat and hat, to the horizontal log on which he had lived for so long. He took the long mesh of woollen sheeting that his daughter had brought to be a rest and support to his own body, and with it he tied Toyner to the upright tree against which the log was lying; then, with an additional touch of fiendish satire, he took a bit of dry bread out of the ample bag of food which Ann had hung there for his own needs, and laid it on Toyner's knees. Having done all this he pushed his boat away with reckless rapidity, and rowed it back into the open water, steering with that unerring speed by which a somnambulist is often seen to perform a dangerous feat.

The moonlit mist and the silence of night closed around this lonely nook in the dead forest and Toyner's form sitting upon the fallen log. In the open river, where no line determined the meeting of the placid moonlit water and the still, moonlit mist, the boat dashed like a dark streak up the white winding Ahwewee toward the green forest around Fentown Falls. The small dark figure of the man within it was working at his oars with a strength and regularity of some powerful automaton. At every stroke the prow shot forward, and the sound of the splashing oars made soft echoes far and wide.



CHAPTER X.

When men have visions the impression left upon their minds is that light from the unseen world of light has in some way broken through into the sphere of their cognizance. The race in its ages of reflection has upon the whole come to the conclusion that that which actually takes place is the gradual growth and the sudden breaking forth of light within the mysterious depths of the man himself. A new explanation of a fact does not do away with the fact.

Toyner was not dead, he was stunned; his head was badly injured. When his consciousness returned, and through what process of inflammation and fever his wounded head went in the struggle of nature toward recovery, was never clearly known. His body, bound with the soft torn cloths to the upright tree, sagged more and more until it found a rest upon the inclined log. The fresh sweet air from pine woods, the cool vapours from the water beneath him, were nurses of wise and delicate touch. The sun arose and shone warmly, yet not hotly, through the air in which dry haze was thickening. The dead trees stood in the calm water, keeping silence as it were, a hundred stalwart guards with fingers at their lips, lest any sound should disturb the life that, with beneficent patience, was little by little restoring the wounded body from within. Even the little vulgar puffing market-boat that twice a day passed the windings of the old river channel—the only disturber of solitude—was kept at so great a distance by this guard of silent trees that no perception of her passing, and all the life and perplexity of which she must remind him, entered into Toyner's half-closed avenues of sense.

For two days the sun rose on Bart through the mellow, smoke-dimmed atmosphere. Each night it lay in a red cloud for an hour in the west, tingeing and dyeing all the mirror below the trees with red. No one was there in the desolate lake to see the twice-told glory of that rosy flood and firmament, unless it was this wondrous light that first penetrated the eyes of the prisoner with soothing brightness.

It was at some hour of light—sunset or sunrise, or it might have been in the blending of the mornings and the evenings in that confusion of mind which takes no heed of time—that Toyner first began to know himself. Then it was not of himself that he took knowledge; his heart in its waking felt after something else around and beneath and above him, everywhere, something that meant light and comfort and rest and love, something that was very strong, that was strength; he himself, Bart Toyner, was part of this strength, and rested in it with a rest and refreshing which is impossible to weakness, however much it may crave.

It came to him as he lay there, not knowing the where or when of his knowledge—it came to him that he had made a great mistake, as a little child makes a mistake in laughable ignorance. Indeed, he laughed within himself as he thought what a strange, childish, grotesque notion he had had,—he had thought, he had actually thought, that God was only a part of things; that he, Bart Toyner, could turn away from God; that God's power was only with him when he supposed himself to be obedient to Him! Yes, he had thought this; but now he knew that God was all and in all.

There came to him, trooping with this new joy of knowledge, the sensuous sight and sound and smell of many things that he had known, but had not understood, before. All the spring-times through which he had walked unconscious of their meaning, came to him. There was a sound in his ears of delicate flowers springing to light through dewy moss, of buds bursting, and he saw the glancing of myriad tiny leaves upon the grey old trees. With precisely the same sense of sweetness came the vision of days when autumn rain was falling, and the red and sear leaf, the nut, the pine-cone and the flower-seed were dropping into the cold wet earth. Was life in the spring, and death in the autumn? Was the power and love of God not resting in the damp fallen things that lay rotting in the ground?

There came before him a troop of the little children of Fentown, all the rosy-cheeked faces and laughing eyes and lithe little dancing forms that he had ever taken the trouble to notice; and Ann and Christa came and stood with them—Christa with her dancing finery, with her beautiful, thoughtless, unemotional face, her yellow hair, and soft white hands; and Ann, a thousand times more beautiful to him, with her sun-brown tints and hazel eyes, so full of energy and forethought, her dark neat hair and working-dress and hardened hands—this was beauty! Over against it he saw Markham, blear-eyed, unkempt and dirty; and his own father, a gaunt, idiotic wreck of respectable manhood; and his mother, faded, worn, and peevish; with them stood the hunch-backed baker of Fentown and all the coarse and ugly sons of toil that frequented its wharfs. There was not a child or a maiden among those he saw first who did not owe their life to one of these. With the children and the maidens there were pleasure and hope; with the older men and women there were effort and failure, sin and despair. The life that was in all of them, was it partly of God and partly of themselves? He laughed again at the question. The life that was in them all was all of God, every impulse, every act. The energy that thrilled them through, by which they acted, if only as brutes act, by which they spoke, if only to lie, by which they thought and felt, even when thought and feeling were false and bad, the energy which upheld them was all of God. That devil, too, that he saw standing close by and whispering to them—his form was dim and fading; he was not sure whether he was a reality or a thought, but—if he had life, was it his own? Somewhere, he could not remember where or when, he had heard the voice of truth saying, "Thou couldst have no power against me except it were given thee from above."

The strange complexity of dreams, which seems so foolish, brings them nearer to reality than we suppose, for there is nothing real which has not manifold meanings. Before this vision of his townspeople faded, Bart saw Ann slowly walk over from the group in which she had risen to be a queen, to that group whose members were worn with disappointment and age; as she went he saw her perfectly as he had never seen her before, the hard shallow thoughts that were woven in with her unremitting effort to do always the thing that she had set herself to do; and he saw, too, a nature that was beneath this outer range of activity, a small trembling fountain of feeling suppressed and shut from the light. In some strange way as she stood, having grown older by transition from one group to the other, he saw that this inner fountain of strength was increasing and overflowing all that other part which had before made up almost the entire personality of the woman. This change did not take place visibly in the other people among whom she stood. It was in Ann he saw the change. He felt very glad he had seen this; he seemed to think of nothing else for a long time.

He forgot then all the detail of that which he had seen and thought, and it seemed to him that he spent a long time just rejoicing in the divine life by which all things were, and by which they changed, growing by transformation into a glory which was still indistinct to him, too far off to be seen in any way except that its light came as the light comes from stars which we say we see and have never really seen at all.

Through this joy and light the details of life began to show again. The two forces which he had always supposed had moulded his life acted his early scenes over again. His young mother, before the shadow of despair had come over her, was seen waiting upon all his boyish footsteps with cheerful love and patience, trying to guide and to help, but trying much more to comfort and to please; and his father, with a strong body and the strength of fixed opinion and formed habits, having no desire for his son except to train and form him as he himself was trained and formed, was seen darkening all the boy's happiness with unreasonable severity, which hardened and sharpened with the opposition of years into selfish cruelty. Toyner had often seen these scenes before; all that was new to him now was that they stood in the vivid light of a new interpretation. Ah! the father's cruelty, the irritable self-love, the incapacity to recognise any form of life but his own, it was of God,—not a high manifestation: the bat is lower than the bird, and yet it is of God. Bart saw now the one great opportunity of life! He saw that the whole of the universe goes to develop character, and the one chief heavenly food set within reach of the growing character for its nourishment is the opportunity to embrace malice with love, to gather it in the arms of patience, convert its shame into glory by willing endurance.

Had he, Bart Toyner, then really been given the power in that beginning of life to put out his hand and take this fruit which would have given him such great strength and stature, or had he only had strength just for what he had done and nothing more?

The answer seemed to come to him from all that he had read of the growth of things. He looked into the forests, into the life of the creatures that now lived in them; he saw the fish in the rivers and the birds in the air, everywhere now roots were feeling under the dark ground for just the food that was needed, and the birds flew open-mouthed, and the fishes darted here and there, and the squirrels hoarded their nuts. Everywhere in the past the growth of ages had been bringing together these creatures and their food by slowly developing in them new powers to assimilate new foods. What then of those that pined and dwindled when the organism was not quite strong enough and the old food was taken away? Ah, well! they fell—fell as the sparrows fall, not one of them without God. And what of man rising through ages from beast to sainthood, rising from the mere dominion of physical law which works out its own obedience into the moral region, where a perpetual choice is ordained of God, and the consequences of each choice ordained? Was not the lower choice often inevitable? Who could tell when or where except God Himself? And the higher choice the only food by which character can grow! So men must often fall. Fall to what end? To pass into that boundless gulf of distant light into which everything is passing, passing straight by the assimilation of its proper food, circuitously by weakness and failure, but still coming, growing, reaching out into infinite light, for all is of God, and God is Love.

All Toyner's thought and sense seemed to lose hold again of everything but that first realisation of the surrounding glory and joy and strength, and the feeling that he himself had to rest for a little while before any new thing was given him to do.

His body lay back upon the grey lifeless branch, wrapped in the ragged, soiled garment that Markham had put upon him; the silence of night came again over the water and the grey dead trees, and nature went on steadily and quietly with her work of healing.



CHAPTER XI.

When Toyner had left Fentown to go and rescue Markham, Ann had stood a good way off upon the dark shore just to satisfy herself that he had got into the boat and rowed down the river. This was not an indication that she doubted him. She followed him unseen because she felt that night that there were elements in his conduct which she did not in the least understand. When he was gone, she went back to fulfil her part of the contract, and she had a strength of purpose in fulfilling it which did not belong mainly to the obligation of her promise. Something in his look when he had come in this evening, in his glance as he bade her farewell, made her eager to fulfil it.

All night, asleep or awake, she was more or less haunted with this new feeling for Toyner—a feeling which did not in her mind resemble love or liking, which would have been perhaps best translated by the word "reverence," but that was not a word in Ann's vocabulary, not even an idea in her mental horizon.

Our greatest gains begin to be a fact in the soul before we have any mental conception of them!

The next day Ann was up early. She took her beer (it was home-brewed and not of great value) and deliberately poured it out, bottle after bottle, into a large puddle in the front road. The men who were passing early saw her action, and she told them that she had "turned temp'rance." She washed the bottles, and set them upside down before the house to dry where all the world might see them. The sign by which she had advertised her beer and its price had been nothing but a sheet of brown paper with letters painted in irregular brush strokes. Ann had plenty of paper. This morning she laid a sheet upon her table, and rapidly painted thereon with her brush such advertisements as these:

_Tea and Coffee, 3 Cents a Cup. Ginger Bread, Baked Beans, Lemonade.

Cooking done to order at any hour and in any style._

By the time this placard was up, Christa had sauntered out to smell the morning air, and she looked at it with what was for Christa quite an exertion of surprise.

She went in to where Ann was scrubbing the tables. Christa never scrubbed except when it was necessary from Ann's point of view that she should, but she never interfered either. Now she only said:

"Ann!"

"I'm here; I suppose you can see me."

"Yes; but, Ann——"

It was so unusual for Christa to feel even a strong emotion of surprise that she did not know in the least how to express it.

Ann stopped scrubbing. She had never supposed that Christa would yield easily to all the terms of the condition; she had not sufficient confidence in her to explain the truth concerning the secret compact.

"Look here, Christa, do you know that Walker died last night? Now I'll tell you what it is; you needn't think that the people who are respectable but not religious will have anything more to do with us, even in the off-hand way that they've had to do with us before now. Father's settled all that for us. Now the only thing we've got to do is to turn religious. We're going to be temp'rance, and never touch a game of cards. You're going to wear plain black clothes and not dance any more. It wouldn't be respectable any way, seeing they may catch father any day, and the least we can do is sort of to go into mourning."

Christa stood bright and beautiful as a child of the morning, and heard the sentence of this long night passed upon her; but instead of looking plaintive, a curiously hard look of necessary acquiescence came about the lines of her cherry lips. Ann was startled by it; she had expected Christa to bemoan herself, and in this look she recognised that the younger sister had an element of character like her own, was perhaps growing to be what she had become. The quality that she honestly admired in herself appeared disgusting to her in pretty Christa, yet she went on to persuade and explain; it was necessary.

"We can't dance, Christa, for no one would dance with us; we can't wear flowers in our hats, for no one would admire them. I suppose you have the sense to see that? The men that come here are a pretty easy-going rough lot, but they draw a line somewhere. Now I've kept you like a lady so far, and I'll go on doing that to the end" (This was Ann's paraphrase for respectability); "so if you don't want to sit at home and mope, we've got to go in for being religious and go to church and meetings. The minister will come to see us, and all that sort will take to speaking to us, and I'll get you into Sunday school. There are several very good-looking fellows that go there, and there's a class of real big girls taught by a Young-Men's-Christian-Association chap. He'd come to see you, you know, if you were in his class."

Christa was perfectly consoled, perfectly satisfied; she even showed her sister some of the animation which had hitherto come to her only when she was flirting with men.

"Ann," she said earnestly, "you are very splendid. I got up thinking there weren't no good in living at all."

Ann eyed her sharply. Was one set of actions the same to Christa as another? and was she content to forget all their own shame and all her father's wretched plight if she could only have a few pleasures for herself? It was exactly the passive state that she had desired to evoke in Christa; but there are many spectres that come to our call and then appal us with their presence!

Ann went on with her work. She was not in the habit of indulging herself in moods or reveries; still, within her grew a silent disapproval of Christa. She felt herself superior to her. After a while another thought came upon her with unexpected force. Christa's motive for taking to the religious life was only self-interest; her own motive was the same; and was not that the motive which she really supposed hitherto to actuate all religious people? Had she not, for instance, been fully convinced that self-interest was the sum and substance of Bart Toyner's religion? Now between Bart Toyner and Christa and herself she felt that a great gulf was fixed.

Well, she did not know; she did not understand; she was not at all sure that she wanted to understand anything more about Bart Toyner and all the complex considerations about life which the thought of him seemed to arouse in her. She felt that the best way of ridding herself of uncomfortable thoughts about him was to be busy in performing all that he could reasonably require at her hands. It is just in the same way that many people rid themselves of thoughts about God.

All that long day, while the sunlight fell pink through the haze, Ann worked at renovating her own life and Christa's. She took Christa and went to some girls of their acquaintance, and presented them with all the feathers, furbelows, and artificials which she and Christa possessed. She cooked some of the viands which she had advertised for sale, and prepared all her small stock of kitchen utensils for the new avocation. It was a long hard day's work, and before it was over the village was ringing with the news of all this change. The minister had already called on Ann and Christa, saying suitable things concerning their father's terrible crime and their own sad position. When he was gone Christa laughed.



CHAPTER XII.

The sweet-scented smoke of the distant forest fires had diffused itself all day in the atmosphere more and more palpably. It was not a gloomy effect, and familiar to eyes accustomed to the Canadian August. All the sunbeams were very pink, and they fell flickering among the shadows of the pear tree upon Markham's grey wooden house, upon the path and the ragged green in front. Ann had pleasant associations with these pink beams because they told of fine weather. Smoke will not lie thus in an atmosphere that is molested with any currents of wind that might bring cloud or storm. On the whole Ann had spent the day happily, for fair weather has much to do with happiness; but when that unusual flood of blood-red light came at sunset, giving an unearthly look to a land which was well enough accustomed to bright sunsets of a more ordinary sort, Ann's courage and good humour failed her; she yielded to the common influence of marvels and felt afraid.

What had she done, and what was she going to do? She was playing with religion; and religion, if it was nothing more, was something which had made Bart Toyner look at her with such a strange smile of selfless hope and desire—hope that she would be something different from what she had been, desire that the best should come to her whatever was going to happen to him. That was the explanation of what had seemed inexplicable in his look (she felt glad to have worked it out at last); and if anything so strange as that were possible in Bart, what was the force with which she was playing? Would some judgment befall her?

The evening closed in. Christa went to bed to finish a yellow-backed novel. As it was the last she was to read for a long time, she thought she might as well enjoy it. Ann sat alone in the outer room. The night was very still. Christa went to sleep, but Ann continued to sit, stitching at the very plain garb that Christa was to don on the morrow, not so much because she needed to work as because she felt no need of sleep. The night being close and warm, her window, a small French casement, stood open. At a late hour, when passers upon the road were few, arrested by some sound, she knew not what, she lifted her head and looked through the open window intently, in the same way as we lift our eyes and look sometimes just because another, a stranger perhaps, has riveted his gaze upon us.

A moment more, and Ann saw some one come within the beams of her own lamp outside of the window; the figure crossed like a dark, silent shadow, but Ann thought she recognised Toyner. The outline of the clothes that he had worn when she had seen him last just about this hour on the previous night was unconsciously impressed upon her mind. A shudder of fear came over her, and then she was astonished at the fear; he might easily have done all that she had given him to do and returned by this time. Yet why did he pass the window in that ghostly fashion and show no sign of coming to the door? A moment or two that she sat seemed beaten out into the length and width of minutes by the throbbing of her nerves, usually so steady. She determined to steel herself against discomfort. If Toyner had done his work and come home and did not think it wise to visit her openly, what was there to alarm in that? Yet she remembered that Toyner had spoken of being away for some indefinite length of time. She had not understood why last night, and now it seemed even more hard to understand.

As she sewed she found herself looking up moment by moment at the window. It was not long before she saw the same figure there again, close now, and in the full light. Her hands dropped nerveless upon her knee; she sat gazing with strained whitened face. The outline of the clothes she associated with the thought of Toyner, but from under the dark hat her father's face looked at her. Not the face of a man she thought, but the face of a spirit, as white as if it were lifeless, as haggard as if it were dead, but with blazing life in the eyeballs and a line like red fire round their rims. In a moment it was gone again.

Ann started up possessed with the desire to prove the ghostly visitant material; passing through the door, she fled outside with her lamp. Whatever had been there had withdrawn itself more quickly than she had come to seek it.

She felt convinced now that her father was dead; she fell to imagining all the ways in which the tragic end might have come. No thought that came to her was satisfactory. What had Bart done? Why had his form seemed to her so inextricably confused with the form of her father at the moment of the apparition? The recognition of a man or his garments, although the result of observation, does not usually carry with it any consciousness of the details that we have observed; and she did not know now what it was that had made her think of Toyner so strongly.

The next morning, as the day was beginning to wear on, one of the Fentown men put his head into Ann's door.

"Do you happen to know where Toyner is?" he asked.

She gave a negative, only to be obliged to repeat it to several questions in quick succession.

"Seen him this morning?"

"Seen him last night?"

"Happen to know where he would likely be?"

The growing feeling of distress in Ann's mind made the shake of her head more and more emphatic. She was of course an object of more or less pity to every one at that time, and the intruder made an explanation that had some tone of apology.

"Oh, well, I didn't know but as you might have happened to have seen him since he came back. His boat's there at the landing all right, but his mother's not seen him up to the house."

During the day Ann heard the same tale in several different forms. Toyner was one of those quiet men not often in request by his neighbours; and as he was known at present to have reason possibly for hidden movements in search of his quarry, there was not that hue and cry raised concerning the presence of the boat and the absence of the owner that would have been aroused in the case of some other; still, the interest in his whereabouts gradually grew, and Ann heard the talk about it. Within her own heart an unexpressed terror grew stronger and stronger. It was founded upon the sense of personal responsibility. She alone knew the secret mission upon which Toyner had left; she alone knew of the glimpse of her father which she had caught the night before, and she doubted now whether she had seen a spirit or visible man. What had happened in the dark hour in which Toyner and Markham had met, and which of them had brought back the boat? The misery of these questions grew to be greater than she could endure; but to confide her distress to any one was impossible. To do so might not only be to put her father's enemies upon his track, but it would be to confess Bart's unfaithfulness to his public duty; and in that curious revolution of feeling which so frequently comes about in hearts where it is least expected, Ann felt the latter would be the more intolerable woe of the two.

Then came another of those strange unearthly sunsets. Ann's mind was made up. Inactivity she could endure no longer. There was one explanation that appeared to her more reasonable than any other; that was, that Bart had wavered in his resolution to relieve Markham, that the latter had died upon the tree where he was hiding, and that Bart would not show himself for the present where Ann could see him. Ann did not believe in this explanation; but because of the apparition which she thought she had seen, because of the horrible nature of the fear it entailed, she determined that, come what would, she would go to that secret place which she alone knew and find out if her father had been taken from it or if any trace remained there to show what had really happened. It was when the sisters were again alone for the night that she first broke the silence of her fears.

"Christa, father came to the window last night, but went away again before I could catch him."

"Sure he would never show his face in this place, Ann. You must have been dreaming!"

"Well, I must try to find him. I tell you what I'm going to do. I've been along all the boats, and there's not one of them I could take without being heard except David Brown's canoe that is tied at the foot of his father's field. I could get that, and I expect to be back here long before it's light. If any one should come to the door asking for me, you say, like the other night, that I'm ill and can't see them."

"Yes," said Christa, without exhibiting much interest. Ann had been the deus ex machina of the house since Christa's babyhood. It never occurred to her that any power needed to interfere on behalf of Ann.

"But if I shouldn't get back by daylight, you'll have to manage to say a word to David Brown. Tell him that I borrowed his canoe for a very special purpose. If you just say that, he'll have sense not to make a fuss."

"Yes," said Christa sleepily.



CHAPTER XIII.

The canoe did not answer to Ann's one slim Indian paddle so lightly as the boat she had taken before had answered to the oars. Kneeling upright in the stern, she was obliged to keep her body in perfect balance.

The moon did not rise now until late, but the smoke that had for two days hung so still and dim had been lifted on a light breeze that came with the darkness. The stars were clear above, and Ann's eyes were well accustomed to the wood and stream.

Ah! how long it seemed before she came round the bend of the river and down to the blasted tree. She felt a repulsion for the whole death-like place to-night that she had not felt before. She had been sure the other night of meeting some one at the end of her secret journey, and now the best she could hope was that the place would be empty; and even if it were empty, perhaps, for all she knew, one of the men for whom she was seeking might be lying dead in the water beneath. Certainly the inexplicable appearance of her father the night before had shaken her nerves. Ann was doing a braver thing than she had ever done in her life, because she was a prey to terror. Lonely as the desolate Ahwewee was, to turn from it into the windings of the secret opening seemed like leaving the world behind and going alone into a region of death. There was no sound but the splash of paddle, the ripple of the still water under the canoe, the occasional voice of a frog from the swampy edges of the lake, and the shrill murmur of crickets from the dry fields beyond.

When Ann came near she saw the bound figure reclining in the arms of the fallen tree. Then she believed that her worst fear had been true—that Bart had been unfaithful, and that her father had died in this wretched place. He must be dead because she had seen his spirit!

She came nearer. He had not died of starvation; the bag of food which she had hung upon the branch hung there yet. She set the canoe close against the tree, and, holding by the tree, raised herself in it. She had to be very careful lest the canoe should tip under her even while she held by the tree. Then she put forth a brave hand, and laid it upon the breast of the unconscious man.

He was not dead. The heart was beating, though not strongly; the body was warm.

"Father, father." She shook him gently.

The answer was a groan, very feeble. It told her at once that the man before her was stricken with some physical ill that made him incapable of responding to her.

And now what was she to do? It was necessary by some means to get her father into the canoe. To that she did not give a second thought, but while he still lived it seemed to her monstrous to take him either back to Fentown Falls or down to The Mills. Her horror of prison and of judgment for him had grown to be wholly morbid and unreasonable, just because his terror of it had been so extreme. Only one course remained. She had the chart that David Brown had given her. He had told her that at that northern edge of the swamp, which could be reached by the way he had marked out, a small farmhouse stood. Possibly the people in this house might not yet have heard of Markham the murderer; or possibly, if they had heard, they might be won for pity's sake to let him regain strength there and go in peace. It was her only chance. The moon was rising now, and she would find the way. She felt strength to do anything when she had realised that the heart beneath her hand was still beating.

Ann moved the canoe under the fallen log, and moving down it upon her knees, she took the rope from the prow, secured it round the log from which the sick man must descend, and fastened it again to the other end of the boat. This at least was a guarantee that they could not all sink together. Even yet the danger of upsetting the canoe sideways was very great. It was only necessity that enabled her to accomplish her task.

"Father, rouse yourself a little." She took Markham's old felt hat, upon which the insensible head was lying, and set it warmly over his brow. She unfastened the bands that tied his body to the log. She had not come without a small phial of the rum that was always necessary for her father, in the hope that she might find him alive. She soaked some morsels of bread in this, and put it in the mouth of the man over whom she was working. It was very dark; the only marvel was, not that she did not recognise Toyner, but that she and he were not both engulfed in the black flood beneath them in the struggle which she made to take him in the canoe.

Twice that day Toyner had stirred and become conscious; but consciousness, except that of confused dreams, had again deserted him. The lack of food, if it had preserved him from fever, had caused the utmost weakness of all his bodily powers; yet when the small amount of bread and rum which he could swallow gave him a little strength, he was roused, not to the extent of knowing who he was or where, but enough to move his muscles, although feebly, under direction. After a long time she had him safely in the bottom of the canoe, his head lying upon her jacket which she had folded for a pillow. At first, as she began to paddle the canoe forward, he groaned again and again, but by degrees the reaction of weakness after exertion made him lapse into his former state that seemed like sleep.

Ann had lost now all her fears of unknown and unseen dangers. All that she feared was the loss of her way, or the upsetting of her boat. The strength that she put into the strokes of her paddle was marvellous. She had just a mile to go before she came to another place where a stretch of still water opened through the trees. There were several of these blind channels opening off the bed of the Ahwewee. They were the terror of those who were travelling in boats, for they were easily mistaken for the river itself, and they led to nothing but impenetrable marsh. From this particular inlet David Brown had discovered a passage to the land, and Ann pursued the new untried way boldly. Somewhere farther on David had told her a little creek flowed in where the eye could not discern any wider opening than was constantly the case between the drowned trees. Its effect upon the current of the water was said to be so slight that the only way to discover where it ran was by throwing some light particles upon the water and watching to see whether they drifted outwards from the wood steadily. She turned the boat gently against a broken stump from which she could take a decaying fragment. An hour passed. She wearily crossed the water to and fro, casting out her chips of punk, straining her eyes to see their motion in the moonlight. The breeze that had moved the smoke had gone again. Above the moon rode through white fleecy clouds. The water and air lay still and warm, inter-penetrated with the white light. The trees, without leaf or twigs, cast no shadow with the moon in the zenith.

The patient experimenting with the chips was a terrible ordeal to Ann. The man whom she supposed to be her father lay almost the whole length of the canoe so close to her, and yet she could not pass his outstretched feet to give him food or stimulant. At last, at last, to her great joy, she found the place where the chips floated outward with steady motion. She then pushed her canoe in among the trees, thankful to know that it, at least, had been there before, that there would be no pass too narrow for it. The canoe itself was almost like a living creature to her by this time. Like an intelligent companion in the search, it responded with gentle motion to her slightest touch.

It seemed to Ann that the light of the moon was now growing very strong and clear. Surely no moon had ever before become so bright! Ann looked about her, almost for a moment dreading some supernatural thing, and then she realised that the night was gone, that pale dawn was actually smiling upon her. It gave her a strange sense of lightheartedness. Her heart warmed with love to the sight of the purple tint in the eastern sky, that bluish purple which precedes the yellow sunrise. On either side of her boat now the water was so shallow that sedge and rushes rose above it.

The herons flapped across her path to their morning fishing.

The creek still made a narrow channel for the canoe. Pretty soon its current flowed between wild undulating tracts of bright green moss in which the trees still stood dead, but bark and lichen now adhered to their trunks, and a few more strokes brought her to the fringes of young spruce and balsam that grew upon the drier knolls. She smelt living trees, dry woods and pastures in front. Then a turn of the narrow creek, and she saw a log-house standing not twenty paces from the stream. Above and around it maples and elms held out green branches, and there was some sort of a clearing farther on.

Ann felt exultant in her triumph. She had brought her boat to a place of safety. She seemed to gather life and strength from the sun; although it still lay below the blue horizon of lake and forest which she had left behind her, the sky above was a gulf of sunshine.

She stepped out of the boat and pushed away the hat to look in her father's face. She saw now who it was that she had rescued. Toyner stirred a little when she touched him, and opened his eyes, the same grave grey eyes with which he had looked at her when he bade her good-bye. There was no fever in them, and, as it seemed to her, no lack of sense and thought. Yet he only looked at her gravely, and then seemed to sleep again.

The girl sprang upright upon the bank and wrung her hands together. It came to her with sudden clearness what had been done. Had Toyner told his tale, she could hardly have known it more clearly. Her father, had tried to murder Bart; her father had tied him in his own place; it was her father who had escaped alone with the boat. It was he himself, and no apparition, who had peered in upon her through the window. She was wrought up into a strong glow of indignation against the baseness that would turn upon a deliverer, against the cruelty of the revenge taken. No wonder that miserable father had not dared to enter her house again or to seek further succour from her! All her pity, all the strength of her generosity, went out to the man who had ventured so much on his behalf and been betrayed. That unspoken reverence for Toyner, a sense of the contrast between him and her father and the other men whom she knew, which had been growing upon her, now culminated in an impulse of devotion. A new faculty opened within her nature, a new mine of wealth.

The thin white-faced man that lay half dead in the bottom of the canoe perhaps experienced some reviving influence from this new energy of love that had transformed the woman who stood near him, for he opened his eyes again and saw her, this time quite distinctly, standing looking down upon him. There was tenderness in her eyes, and her sunbrowned face was all aglow with a flush that was brighter than the flush of physical exercise. About her bending figure grew what seemed to Bart's half-dazzled sense the flowers of paradise, for wild sunflowers and sheafs of purple eupatorium brushed her arms, standing in high phalanx by the edge of the creek. Bart smiled as he looked, but he had no thoughts, and all that he felt was summed up in a word that he uttered gently:

"Ann!"

She knelt down at once. "What is it, Bart?" and again: "What were you trying to say?"

It is probable that her words did not reach him at all. He was only half-way back from the region of his vision; but he opened his eyes and looked at her again.

The sun rose, and a level golden beam struck through between the trunks of the trees, touching the flowers and branches here and there with moving lights, and giving all the air a brighter, mellower tint. There was something that Bart did feel a desire to say—a great thought that at another time he might have tried in a multitude of words to have expressed and failed. He saw Ann, whom he loved, and the paradise about her; he wanted to bring the new knowledge that had come to him in the light of his vision to bear upon her who belonged now to the region of outward not of inward sight and yet was part of what must always be to him everlasting reality.

"What were you going to say, Bart?" she asked again tenderly.

And again he summed up all that he thought and felt in one word:

"God."

"Yes, Bart," she said, with some sudden intuitive sense of agreement.

Then, seeming to be satisfied, he closed his eyes and went back into the state of drowsiness.



CHAPTER XIV.

Ann went up to the house. It was a great relief to her to remember that the man for whom she was going to ask help was no criminal. She could hold up her head and speak boldly.

Another minute and she began to look curiously to see how long the grass and weeds had grown before the door. It was some months since David Brown had been here. The doubt which had entered Ann's mind grew swiftly. She knocked loudly upon the door and upon the wooden shutters of the windows. The knocks echoed through empty rooms.

She had no hesitation in house-breaking. In a shed at the back she found a broken spade which formed a sufficiently strong and sharp lever for her purpose. She pried open a shutter and climbed in. She found only such furniture as was necessary for a temporary abode. A small iron stove, a few utensils of tin, a huge sack which had been used for a straw bed, and a few articles of wooden furniture, were all that was to be seen.

Upon the canvas sack she seized eagerly. Bart might be dying, or he might be recovering from some injury; in either case she had only one desire, and that was to procure for him the necessary comforts. Having no access to hay or straw, she began rapidly to gather the bracken which was standing two and three feet high in great quantities wherever the ground was dry under the trees. She worked with a nervous strength that was extraordinary, even to herself, after the toilsome night. When she had filled the sack, she put it upon the floor of the lower room and went back to the canoe. She saw that Bart had roused himself and was sitting up. He was even holding on to the rushes with his hand—an act which she thought showed the dreamy state of his mind, for she did not notice that the rope had come undone. She helped Bart out of the canoe, putting her arm strongly round him so that he was able to walk. She saw that he had not his mind yet; he said no word about the help she gave him; he walked as a sleeping man might walk. When she laid him down upon the bed of bracken and arranged his head upon the thicker part which she had heaped for a pillow, he seemed to her to fall asleep almost at once; and yet, for fear that his strange condition was not sleep, she hastily opened the bag of food and the flask of rum.

She stripped the twigs from a tiny spruce tree, piling them inside the old stove. When they had cracked and blazed with a fierce, sudden heat, Ann could only break bread-crumbs into a cupful of boiling water and put a few drops of rum in it. She woke Bart and fed him as she might have fed a baby. When he lay down again exhausted, with that strange moan which he always gave when he first put back his head, she had the comfort of believing that a better colour came to his cheek than before. She resolved that if he rested quietly for a few hours and appeared better after the next food she gave him, she would think it safe to cushion the canoe with bracken and take him home. This thought suggested to her to moor the canoe.

She went down to the creek again, but it was too late. The water running gently and steadily had done its work, taken the canoe out from among the rushes, and floated it down between the mosses of the swamp. Making her feet bare, she sprang from one clump of fern root to another, sometimes missing her footing and striking to her knees through the green moss that let her feet easily break into the black wet earth. In a few minutes she could see the canoe. It had drifted just beyond the swamp, where all the ground was lying under some feet of water; but there a tree had turned its course out of the current of the creek, so that it was now sidling against two ash trees, steady as if at anchor. So few feet as it was from her, Ann saw at a glance that to reach it was quite impossible. Realising the helplessness of her position without this canoe, she might have been ready to brave the dangers of a struggle in deep water to obtain it, but the danger was that of sinking in bottomless mud. The canoe was wholly beyond her reach. Retracing her steps, she washed her feet in the running creek, and, as she put on her shoes, sitting upon the grassy bank in the morning sunlight, she felt drowsily as if she must rest there for a few minutes. She let her head fall upon the arm she had outstretched on the warm sod.

When she stirred again she had that curious feeling of inexplicable lapse of time that comes to us after unexpected and profound slumber. The sun had already passed the zenith; the tone in the voices of the crickets, the whole colouring of earth and sky, told her, before she had made any exact observation of the shadows, that it was afternoon.

She prepared more food for the sick man. When she had fed him and put him to rest again, she went out to discover what means of egress by land was to be found from this lonely dwelling. She followed the faint trace of wheel-ruts over the grass, which for a short distance ran through undergrowth of fir and weeds. She came out upon a cleared space of some acres, from which a fine crop of hay had clearly been taken, apparently about a month before. Whoever had mowed the hay had evidently been engaged also in a further clearing of the land beyond, and there was a small patch where tomatoes and pea vines lay neglected in the sun; the peas had been gathered weeks before, but the tomatoes, later in ripening, hung there turning rich and red. Ann went on across the cleared space. Following the track, she came to a thick bit of bush beyond, where a long cutting had been made, just wide enough for a cart to pass through.

There was no other way out; Ann must walk through this long green passage. No knight in a fairy tale ever entered path that looked more remote from the world's thoroughfares. When she had walked a mile she came to an opening where the ground dipped all round to a bottom which had evidently at some time held water, for the flame-weed that grew thick upon it stood even, the tops of its magenta flowers as level as a lake—it was, in fact, a lake of faded crimson lying between shores of luxuriant green. The cart-ruts went right down into the flame-flowers, and she thought she could descry where they rose from them on the other side. Evidently the blossoming had taken place since the last cart had passed over, and no doubt many miles intervened between this and the next dwelling-house. Nothing but the thought of necessities that might arise for help on Bart's account made her make the toilsome passage, knee-deep among the flowers, to see whether, beyond that, the road was passable; but she only found that it was not fit for walkers except at a time of greater drought than the present. The swamp crept round in a ring, so that she discovered herself to be upon what was actually an island. Ann turned back, realising that she was a prisoner.

On her way home again she gathered blood-red tomatoes; and finding a wild apple tree, she added its green fruit to what she already held gathered in the skirt of her gown; starvation at least was not a near enemy.

She had made her investigation calmly, and with a light heart; she felt sure that Bart had grown better and stronger during the day, and that was all that she cared about. She never paused to ask herself why his recovery was not merely a humane interest but such a satisfying joy. The knowledge of her present remoteness from all distresses of her life as a daughter and sister came to her with a wonderful sense of rest, and opened her mind to the sweet influences of the summer night and its stars as that mind had never been opened before.

She cooked the apples and tomatoes, making quite a good meal for herself. Then she roused Bart, and gave him part of the cooked fruit.



CHAPTER XV.

The darkness closed in about eight o'clock. Ann sat on the doorstep watching the lights in the sky shine out one by one. Last night had been the only night which had ever possessed terrors for her, and now that she believed her father to be still alive she thought no longer with any horror of his apparition. She wondered where he was wandering, but her heart hardened towards him. She rested and dozed by turns upon the doorstep until about midnight. Then in the darkness she heard a voice from the bracken couch that assured her that Bart's mind had come back to him again.

"Who is there?" he asked.

"I am going to give you something to eat," she said, letting her voice speak her name.

"Is it very dark?" he asked, "or am I blind?"

"You can see right enough, Bart," she said gently; "you can watch me kindle the fire."

She left the door of the stove open while the spruce twigs were crackling, and in the red, uncertain, dancing light he caught glimpses of the room in which he was, and of her figure, but the fire died down very quickly again.

"I was thinking, Ann," he said slowly, "that it was a pity for Christa to be kept from dancing. She is young and light on her feet. God must have made her to dance."

"Christa's well enough without it," said Ann, a little shortly.

She thought more coldly of Christa since she had come up to a higher level herself.

"Well, I only meant about Christa that I think I made a mistake," said Bart slowly.

"How a mistake?" she asked.

It was a very hard question to answer. A moment before and he thought he had seen what the mistake was and how to speak, but when he tried, all that manifold difficulty of applying that which is eternal to that which is temporal came between his thought and its expression.

He could not know clearly wherein his difficulty lay; no one had taught him about the Pantheism which obliterates moral distinctions, or told him of the subjective ideal which sweeps aside material delight. He only felt after the realities expressed by these phrases, and dimly perceived that truth lies midway between them, and that truth is the mind of God, and can only be lived, not spoken. For a while he lay there in the darkness, trying to think how he could tell Ann that to his eyes all things had become new; after a little while he did try to tell her, and although the words were lame, and apparently contradictory to much that they both knew was also true, still some small measure of his meaning passed into her mind.

"God is different from what I ever thought," he said; "He isn't in some things and not in others; it's wicked to live so as to make people think that, for they think they can get outside of Him, and then they don't mind Him at all."

"How do you know it?" she asked curiously.

"I saw it. Perhaps God showed me because I was so hard up. It's God's truth, Ann, that I am saying."

The room was quite dark again now; the chirping of the crickets outside thrilled through and through it, as if there were no walls there but only the darkness and the chirping. Ann sat upon a wooden chair by the stove.

She considered for a minute, and then she said, with the first touch of repentance in her heart: "Well, I reckon God ain't in me, any way. There isn't much of God in me that I can see."

"I'll tell you how it is if I can." Toyner's voice had a strange rest and calm in it. He spoke as a man who looked at some inward source of peace, trying to describe it. "Supposing you had a child, you wouldn't care anything about him at all if you could just work him by wires so that he couldn't do anything but just what you liked; and yet the more you cared about him, the more it would hurt you dreadfully if he didn't do the things that you knew were good for him, and love you and talk to you too. Well now, suppose one day, when he was a little fellow, say, he wanted to touch something hot, and you told him not to. Well, if he gave it up, you'd make it easier for him to be good next time; but suppose he went on determined to have his own way, can't you think of yourself taking hold of his hand and just helping him to reach up and touch the hot thing? I tell you, if you did that it would mean that you cared a great sight more about him than if you just slapped him and put it out of his reach; and yet, you see, you'd be helping him to do the wrong thing just because you wanted to take the naughtiness out of his heart, not because you were a devil that wanted him to be naughty. Well, you see, between us and our children" (Toyner was talking as men do who get hold of truth, not as an individual, but as mankind) "it's not the same as between God and us. They have our life in them, but they're outside us and we're outside them, and so we get into the way, when we want them to be good, of giving them a punishment that's outside the harm they've done, and trying to put the harm they are going to do outside of their reach; and when they do the right thing, half the time we don't help them to do it again. But that isn't God's way. Nothing is ever outside of Him; and what happens after we have done a thing is just what must happen, nothing more and nothing less, so that we can never hope to escape the good or the evil of what we have done; for the way things must happen is just God's character that never changes. You see the reason we can choose between right and wrong when a tree can't, or a beast, is just because God's power of choice is in us and not in them. So we use His power, and when we use it right and think about pleasing Him—for, you see, we know He can be pleased, for our minds are just bits of His mind (as far as we know anything about Him; but of course we only know a very little)—He puts a tremendous lot of strength into us, so that we can go on doing right next time. Of course it's a low sort of right when we don't think about Him, for that's the most of what He wants us to do; but I tell you" (a little personal fire and energy here broke the calm of the recital), "I tell you, when I do look up to God and say, 'Now I am going to do this for Your sake and because You are in me and will do it,' I tell you, there's tremendous power given us. That's the law that makes the value of religion; I know it by the way I gave up drinking. But now, look here; most of the time we don't use God's will, that He lends us, to do what's right; well, then He doesn't slap us and put the harm out of our reach. He does just what the mother does when she takes the child's hand and puts it against the hot thing, and the burn hurts her as much as it hurts the child; but He is not weak like we are to do it only once in a way. I tell you, Ann, every time you do a wrong thing God is with you; that is what I saw when I was hard up and God showed me how things really were. Now, look here, there isn't any end to it that we can see here; it's an awful lot of help we get to do the wrong thing if that's the thing we choose to do. It gets easier and easier, and at first there's a lot of pleasure to it, but by-and-by it gets more and more dreadful, and then comes death, and that's the end here. But God does not change because we die, and wherever we go He is with us and gives us energy to do just what we choose to do. It's hell before we die when we live that way, and it's hell after, for ages and ages and worlds and worlds perhaps, just until the hell-fire of sin has burned the wrong way of choosing out of us. But remember, God never leaves us whatever we do; there's nothing we feel that He doesn't feel with us; we must all come in the end to being like Himself, and there's always open the short simple way of choosing His help to do right, instead of the long, long way through hell. But I tell you, Ann, whether you're good or whether you're wicked, God is in you and you are in Him. If He left you, you would neither be good nor wicked, you would stop being; but He loves you in a bigger, closer way than you can think of loving anybody; and if you choose to go round the longest way you can, through the hell-fire of sin on earth and all the other worlds, He will suffer it all with you, and bring you in the end to be like Himself."

The calm voice was sustained in physical strength by the strength of the new faith.

Ann's reply followed on the track of thoughts that had occurred to her. "Well now, there's that awful low girl, Nelly Bowes. She's drunk all the time, and she's got an awful disease. She's as bad as bad can be, and so is the man she lives with; and that little child of hers was born a hard-minded, sickly little beast." Her words had a touch of triumphant opposition as she brought them out slowly. "It's a mean, horrid shame for the child to be born like that. It wasn't its fault. Do you mean to say God is with them?"

"It's a long sight easier to believe that than that He just let them go to the devil! I tell you it's an awful wicked thing to teach people that God can save them and doesn't. God is saving those two and the child just by the hell they've brought on themselves and it; and He's in hell with them, and He'll bring them out to something grander than we can think about. They could come to it without giving Him all that agony and themselves too; but if they won't, He'll go through it with them rather than turn them into puppets that He could pull by wires. And as to the child, I can't see it quite clear; but I see this much that I know is true: it's God's character to have things so that a good man has a child with a nice clean soul, and it's just by the same way of things that the other happens too. It's the working out of the bad man's salvation to see his child worse than himself, and it's the working out of the child's salvation to have his bad soul in a bad body. Look you, can't you think that in the ages after death the saving of the soul of that child may be the one thing to make that man and woman divine? They'll never, never get rid of their child, and the child will come quicker to the light through the blackness he is born to than if, having the bad soul that he has, God was to set him in heaven. But, look you, Ann, there isn't a day or an hour that God is not asking them to choose the better and the quicker way, and there isn't a day or an hour that He isn't asking you and me and every one else in the world to do as He does so as to help them to choose it, and live out the sufferings of their life with them till they do."

Ann sat quite still; she had a feeling that if she moved to make any other sound, however slight, than that of speech some spell would be broken. In the darkness Bart had awakened out of the stupor of his injury; and although Ann could not have expressed it, she felt that his voice came like the speech of a soul that is not a part of the things we see and touch. It was so strange to her that he did not ask her where he was. For a few minutes more at least she did not want to bring the least rustle of material surroundings into their talk. She was still incredulous; it is only a very weak mind that does not take time to grow into a new point of view.

"Bart, was God with father when he tried to kill you and tied you to the tree?"

"Yes."

"How do you know?"

"You can't think of God being less than something else. If God was not in your father, then space is outside God's mind. You can't think that God wanted to save your father from doing it and didn't, unless you think that the devil was stronger than God. You can't think that you are more loving than God; and if He is so loving, He couldn't let any one do what wasn't just the best thing. I tell you, it's a love that's awful to think of that will go on giving men strength to do wrong until through the ages of hell they get sick of it, rather than make them into machines that would just go when they're wound up and that no one could love."

"Do they know all this in church, Bart?" Ann asked. It had never occurred to her before to test her beliefs by this standard, but now it seemed necessary; she felt after tradition instinctively. The nakedness of Bart's statements seemed to want tradition for a garment.

Bart's words were very simple. "When I was fastened on that log and saw all this, I saw that Jesus knew it all, and that that was what all His life and dying meant, and that the people that follow Him are learning to know that that was what it meant; it takes them a long, long time, and we can't understand it yet, but as the world goes on it will come clearer. Everybody that knows anything about Him says all this in church, only they don't quite understand it. There's many churches, Ann, where the people all get up and say out loud, 'He descended into hell.' I don't know much, for I've only read the Bible for one year; but if you think of all that Jesus did and all that happened to Him, you will see what I mean. People have made little of it by saying it was a miracle and happened just once, but He knew better. He said that God had been doing it always, and that He did nothing but what He saw God doing, and that when men saw Him they would know that God was like that always. Haven't I just been telling you that God bears our sins and carries our sorrows with us until we become blessed because we are holy? We can always choose to be that, but He will never make us choose. Jesus never made anybody do anything; and, Ann, if there are things in the Bible that we don't understand to mean that, it is because they are a parable, and a parable, Ann, is putting something people can't understand in pictures that they can look at and look at, and always learn something every time they look, till at last they understand what is meant. People have always learned just as much from the Bible as they can take in, and made mistakes about the rest; but it is God's character to make us learn even by mistakes."

Ann's interest began to waver. They were silent awhile, and then, "Bart, do you know where you are?" she asked.

"I don't seem to care much where I am, as long as you are here." There was a touch of shyness in the tone of the last words that made all that he had said before human to her.

"If it hadn't been that I thought it was father, I'd have taken you home." She told him how she had brought him. "If it had been a boat," she said, "I'd have found out who it was before we got here, but the canoe was too narrow."



CHAPTER XVI.

Ann dosed where she sat. Toyner slept again. At length they were both aware that the level light of the sun was in the room.

Ann sat up, looking at the door intently. Then her eyes moved as if following some one across the room.

"What is it?" asked Toyner.

Ann started up with one swift look of agonised entreaty, and then it seemed that what she had seen vanished, for she turned to Bart trembling, unable to speak at first, sobs struggling with her breath.

"It was father—I saw him come to the door and come in. He's dead now."

"What did he look like?" Toyner's voice was very quiet.

"He looked as if he was dead, but as if he was mad too—his body as if it was dead, and himself wild and mad and burning inside of it." She was crouching on the floor, shaken with the sobs of a new and overwhelming pity. "O Bart! I never cared—cared anything for him before—except to have him comfortable and decent; but if I thought he was going to be—like that—now I think I would die to save him if I could."

"Would you die to save him? So would God; and you can't believe in God at all unless you know that He does what He wants to do. And God does it; dies in him, and is in him now; and He will save him."

Bart's eyes were full of peace.

"Can't you trust God, Ann? When He is suffering so much for love of each of us? He could make us into good machines, but He won't. Can't you begin to do what He is doing for yourself and other people? Ann, if He suffers in your father and in you, He is glad when you are glad. Try to be glad always in His love and in the glory of it."

Ann's mind had reverted again to the traditions of which she knew so little. "I don't want to go to heaven," she said, "if father is in some place looking like he did just now."

"Heaven" (Bart repeated the word curiously), "heaven is inside you when you grow to be like God; and through all ages and worlds heaven will be to do as He does, to suffer with those that are suffering, and to die with those that are dying. But remember, Ann, too, it means to rejoice with those who are rejoicing; and joy is greater than pain and heaviness. And heaven means always to be in peace and strength and delight, because it is along the line of God's will where His joy flows."

Ann rose and ran out of the house. To be in the sunshine and among the wild sunflowers was more to her just then than any wisdom. The wave of pity that had gone over her soul had ebbed in a feeling of exhaustion. Her body wanted warmth and heat. She felt that she wanted only that. After she had sat for an hour near the bank of the rippling stream, and all her veins were warmed through and through with the sunlight, the apparition of her father seemed like a dream. She had seen him thus once in life, and supposed him a spirit. She was ready to suppose what she had now seen to be a repetition of that last meeting, coming before she was well roused from her sleep. She took comfort because her pulses ran full and quiet once more. She thought of her love to Bart, and was content. As to all that Bart had said—ah well! something she had gathered from it, which was a seed in her mind, lay quiet now.

At length Toyner found strength to walk feebly, and sat down on the doorstep, where he could see Ann. It was his first conscious look upon this remote autumn bower, and he never forgot its joy. The eyes of men who have just arisen from the dim region that lies near death are often curiously full of unreasoning pleasure. Within himself Toyner called the place the Garden of Eden.

"If only I had not brought you here!" said Ann. "If only I had not left the canoe untied!"

For answer Bart looked around upon the trees and flowers and upon her with happy eyes that had no hint of past or future in them. Something of the secret of all peace—the Eternal Now—remained with him as long as the weakness of this injury remained.

"Don't fret, Ann" (with a smile).

"I'm afraid for you; you look awful ill, and ought to have a doctor."

He had it in his mind to tell her that he was all right and desired only what he had; but, in the dreamy reflective mood that still held him, what he said was:

"If all the trouble in earth and heaven and hell were put together, Ann, it would be just like clouds passing before the sun of joy. The clouds are never at an end, but each one passes and melts away. Ann! sorrow and joy are like the clouds and the sun."

It is never destined that man should remain long in Eden. About noon that day Ann heard a shout from the direction of the lake outside among the dead trees; the shout was repeated yet nearer, and in a minute or two she recognised the voice and heard the sound of oars splashing up the narrow channel made by the running creek. The thought of this deliverance had not occurred to her; yet when she recognised the voice it seemed to her natural enough that David Brown should have divined where his canoe might have been brought. She stood waiting while his boat came up the creek. The young athlete sprang from it, question and reproach in his handsome young face. She found no difficulty then in telling him just what she had done, and why. She felt herself suddenly freed from all that life of frequent deception which she had so long practised. She had no desire to dupe any man now into doing any service. Something in the stress of the last days, in her new reverence for Bart, had wrought a change in the relative value she set on truth and the gain of untruth. She held up her head with a gesture of new dignity as she told David that she had sought her father and found Bart.

"Father has half killed him, and now it hurts me to see him ill. Bart is a good man. O David, I tell you there is no one in the world I mind about so much as Bart. Could you take him in your boat now to the hospital at The Mills? He would have done as much for you, and more, if you had got hurt in that way."

So David took the man Ann loved to the hospital at The Mills. He did it willingly if he did it ruefully. Ann went home, as she had come, in the canoe, except that she had gone out in the dead of night and she went home in broad daylight.