CHAPTER IX.
The arrangement had been a very pleasant one, every way, but somehow John did not feel as if David had as much outside help as he needed.
The young man was not imaginative; an ideal, however high, was a far less real thing to David than to old John.

He pondered during many sleepless hours the advisability of having David sign the pledge.
David had always refused to do it hitherto.

He had a keen sense of shame in breaking a verbal promise on this subject; but he had an almost superstitious feeling regarding the obligation of anything he put his name to; and this very feeling made John hesitate to press the matter.

For, he argued, and not unwisely, "if David should break this written obligation, his condition would seem to himself irremediable, and he would become quite reckless." In the morning this anxiety was solved.

When John came down to breakfast, he found David walking about the room with a newspaper in his hand, and in a fever heat of martial enthusiasm.