re?

His wife Elaine. She had promised to help him, for them to start
together, to turn out of their home and their entertaining all
intoxicating beverages, to stand side by side in their social circle
and be abstainers. Then there was Reggie. He was helping already. Not
ostentatiously, not in a burdensome way. Only just a cycle ride here
and there, or a walk, or a concert, or an hour on the church organ,
when Reggie would blow and Mr. Gray, who was musical, would play as
nobody in the town, not excepting the organist, could play. Or a game
of chess in Mrs. Gray's drawing-room, while Elaine played or sang to
them and served them with delicious coffee.

There were other friends too--friends who had been shy of him and
Elaine lately, but who had once been pleasant, intellectual friends,
and who would be friends again if things were different.

All these were on the other side.

But he knew, and his head dropped upon his folded arms with a
groan--he knew that none of these things would keep him from
satisfying his desire; that they could give him no strength to resist.

They might indeed claim his attention for a little while, but surely,
as those smiling friends predicted, he would drift back to the old
temptation.

There were real tears of shame and mortification in his eyes, as he
lifted them to the sky once more. Oh! if he could only begin again; if
he had only been brought up as an abstainer, as children were brought
up now-a-days; if he had only taken his stand that side, as a young
man, like companions of his own youth had done; if only he had been
born strong and not with this weakness.

But all such regrets were unavailing. He knelt there in the moonlight
what he was, what he had been made, what he had made himself, and
there was something in him that told him that to-night was a deciding
point in his life.

And to drift needed no strength, no anything. Only just to get up from
his knees and to go upstairs to bed, and to wake again to the old life
in the morning.

But the very fact that he was kneeling came to his mind to remind him,
and the quiet sky above him spoke to him of strength and peace, and
suddenly he bowed his head upon the sill.

"Oh, God, what shall I do?" he moaned. And softly, a voice out of the
past--his sweet old grandmother's voice--came to him with words he had
never heard or heeded, since she taught them to him in his childhood.

"While we were yet without strength, in due time C