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.