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Updated: June 19, 2025
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.
Then he made, with all the force and eloquence he could, the personal appeal of the Christ whom he felt to be slighted. "You have spoken of the sufferings of lost and wretched men," he went on; "think of His sufferings! You have spoken of your loneliness; think of His loneliness!" Then suddenly Bart Toyner made a gesture as a slave might who casts off the chains of bondage.
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.
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.
"Dear, dear fellow," said the young preacher, his arm drawing closer round Bart, "He is able and willing to keep you; all you have to do is to take Him for your Master, and He will come to you and make a new man of you. He will take the drink crave away. He knows as well as you do that you can't fight it." "I don't believe it," said Toyner.
I did not know then that the beginning of this provincial salon, which Toyner's wife had kept about her for so many years, and to which she gave a genuine brilliance, however raw the material, had been a wooden shanty, in which a small income was made by the sale of home-brewed beer. I always remember Ann Toyner as I saw her that first time.
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.
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." Ann dosed where she sat. Toyner slept again.
When it was over the stranger took Toyner by the arm and told him privately that he was convinced that the young woman knew nothing whatever about the prisoner, and as Markham had been gone now forty-eight hours it was his opinion that it was not near Fentown that he would be found.
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.
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