have to give me the promise first, and I'll trust you to keep it."

Ann said nothing. The immediate weight of agonised care for her father's
life was lifted off her; but she had a strange feeling that the man who
had taken her responsibility had taken upon him its suffering too in a
deeper sense than she could understand. It flashed across her, not
clearly but indistinctly, that the chief element in her suffering had
been the shame of defying law and propriety rather than let her father
undergo a just penalty. In some way or other this had been all
transferred to Bart, and in the glimmering understanding of his
character which was growing within her, she perceived that he had it in
him to suffer under it far more intensely than she had suffered. It was
very strange that just when she obtained the promise she wanted from him
she would have been glad to set him free from it!

Within certain self-pleasing limits Ann had always been a good-natured
and generous person, and she experienced a strong impulse of this good
nature and generosity just now, but it was only for a moment, and she
stifled it as a thing that was quite absurd. Her father must be
relieved, of course, from his horrid situation; and, after all, Bart
could help him quite easily, more easily than any other man in the world
could, and then come back and go on with his life as before. Questions
of conscience had never, so far, clouded Ann's mental horizon. A
moment's effort to regain her habitual standpoint made it quite clear to
her that in this case it was she, she and Christa, who were making the
sacrifice; a minute more, and she could almost have found it in her
heart to grumble at the condition of the vow which she had so liberally
sketched the night before, and only the fact that there was something
about Bart which she did not at all understand, and a fear that that
something might be a propensity to withdraw from his engagement, made
her submissively adhere to it.

"Christa and I will sign the pledge. We will give up dancing and wearing
finery. We will stop being friends with worldly people, and we will go
to church and meetings, and try to like them." Ann repeated her vow.

Bart took the pen and ink with which she chronicled her sales of beer
and wrote the vow twice on two pages of his note-book; at the bottom he
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 elem