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Updated: May 19, 2025
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.
It was not forgotten that Toyner had been a wicked man and that Ann's father had been a murderer. It was a strange effort this, to increase virtue in the virtuous, not by separation from, but by friendship with, the unrepentant. To Toyner sin was an abhorred thing.
"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.
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. Would some judgment befall her?
Soon he only saw his way step by step, around there was darkness; but through that darkness, except in one black hour, he always saw the mount of transfiguration and the light of heaven. Another six months passed, and an event occurred which gave a great shock to the little community and gave Toyner a pain of heart such as almost nothing else could have given.
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.
Toyner saw the detective depart by the afternoon boat, and as he walked back upon the bit of hot dusty road in the sun he reeled, not with the spirits he had taken, but with the sickening sense that his battle was lost. Nothing seemed fair to him, nothing attractive, but to drink one more glass of spirits, and to go and make promises to Ann that would be sweet to her ear.
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.
It is easy to believe in God holding us up when others do, but awfully hard all alone. He knew that, He warned them to keep together; but all the same He lived out His prayers alone." Toyner looked at the preacher, love and reverence in his eyes. "You saved me once," he said; "you have saved me again." But the preacher went home very sorrowful, for he did not believe that Bart Toyner was saved.
Another reason there was which acted as powerfully to rob him the soul-bewildering difficulty of believing that the God of physical law can also be the God of promise, that He that is within us and beneath us can also be above us with power to lift us up. Without a firm grip on this supernatural upholding power Toyner was a man with a diseased craving for intoxicants.
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