Without a firm grip on this supernatural upholding power Toyner was a man with a diseased craving for intoxicants.  He fled from them as a man flies from deadly infection; but with all the help that total abstinence and the absence of temptation can give he failed in the battle.  A few weeks after he had returned to Fentown he was brought into his mother’s house one morning dead drunk.  The mother, whose heart had revived within her a little during the last year, now sank again into her previous dejection.  Her friends said to her that they had always known how it would be in the case of so sudden a reformation.  When Toyner woke up his humiliation was terrible; he bore it as he had borne all the rest of his pain and shame, silently enough.  No one but Ann Markham even guessed the agony that he endured, and she had not the chance to give a kindly look, for at this time Toyner, unable to trust himself with himself, was afraid to look upon Ann lest he should smirch her life.

Again Toyner set his feet sternly in the way of sobriety.  Ah! how he prayed, beseeching that God, who had revealed Himself to be greater and nobler than had before been known, would not because of that show Himself to be less powerful towards those that fear Him.  It is the prayer of faith, not the prayer of agonised entreaty, that takes hold of strength.  Toyner failed again and again.  There was a vast difference now between this and his former life of failure, for now he never despaired, but took up the struggle each time just where he had laid it down, and moreover the intervals of sobriety were long, and the fits of drunkenness short and few; but there were not many besides Ann who noticed this difference.  And as for Toyner, the shame and misery of failure so filled his horizon that he could not see the favourable contrast—­shame and misery, but never despair; that one word had gone out of his life.

One day a visitor came hurrying down the street to Toyner’s home.  The stranger had the face of a saint, and the hasty feet of those who are conscious that they bear tidings of great joy.  It was Toyner’s friend, the preacher.  Bart had often written to him, and he to his convert.  Of late the letters had been fraught with pain to both, but this was the first time that the preacher had found himself able to come a long journey since he had heard of Toyner’s fall.  He came, his heart big with the prayer of faith that what he had done once he might be permitted to do again—­lead this man once more into the humble path of a time-honoured creed and certain self-conquest.  To the preacher the two were one and indivisible.

When this life is passed away, shall we see that our prayers for others have been answered most lavishly by the very contradiction of what we have desired?

The visit was well timed.  Bart Toyner’s father lay dying; and in spite of that, or rather in consequence of nights of watching and the necessary handling of stimulants, Bart sat in his own room, only just returned to soberness after a drunken night.  With face buried in his hands, and a heart that was breaking with sorrow, Bart was sitting alone; and then the preacher came in.