Ann’s plan of the way in which Toyner more than any other man could aid her father was simple enough.  He who was known to be in pursuit of Markham was to take him as a friend through the town at The Mills and start him on the road at the other side.  Markham was little known at The Mills, and no one would be likely to take the companion of the constable to be the criminal for whose arrest he had been making so much agitation; they were to travel at the early hour of dawn when few were stirring.  This plan, with such modifications as his own good sense suggested, Toyner was willing to adopt.

He started earlier in the evening than she had done, having no particular desire for secrecy.  He told his friends that he was going to row to The Mills by night, and those who heard him supposed that he had gained some information concerning Markham that he thought it best to report.  It was a calm night; the smoke of distant burning was still in the air.

He dropped down the river in the dark hours before the moonrise, and began to row with strength, as Ann had done, when he reached the placid water.  His boat was light and well built.  He could see few yards of dark water in advance; he could see the dark outline of the trees.  The water was deep; there were no rocks, no hidden banks; he did not make all the haste he could, but rowed on meditatively—­he was always more or less attracted by solitude.  To-night the mechanical exercise, the darkness, the absolute loneliness, were greater rest to him than sleep would have been.  In a despairing dull sort of way he was praying all the time; his mind had contracted a habit of prayer, at least if expressing his thoughts to the divine Being in the belief that they were heard may be called prayer.

Probably no one so old or so wise but that he will behave childishly if he can but feel himself exactly in the same relation to a superior being that a child feels to a grown man.  Toyner expressed his grievance over and over again with childlike simplicity; he explained to God that he could not feel it to be right or fair that, when he had prayed so very much, and prayers of the sort to which a blessing was promised, he should be given over to the damning power of circumstance, launched in a career of back-sliding, and made thereby, not only an object of greater scorn to all men than if he had never reformed, but actually, as it appeared to him, more worthy of scorn.

He did not expect his complaints to be approved by the Deity, and gained therefore no satisfying sense that the prayer had ascended to heaven.

The moon arose, the night was very warm; into the aromatic haze a mist was arising from the water on all sides.  It was not so thick but that he could see his path through it in the darkness; but when the light came he found a thin film of vapour between him and everything at which he looked.  The light upon it was so great that it seemed to be luminous in itself, and it had a slightly magnifying power, so that distances looked greater, objects looked larger, and the wild desolate scene with which he was familiar had an aspect that was awful because so unfamiliar.