th, 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