passed into autumn, the autumn into winter, and the
winter into spring again. Every feverish morning, with its blank
listlessness and despair, seemed more hateful than the last; every coming
night more impossible to brave without arming herself in leaden stupor.
The morning light brought no gladness to her: it seemed only to throw its
glare on what had happened in the dim candle-light--on the cruel man
seated immovable in drunken obstinacy by the dead fire and dying lights
in the dining-room, rating her in harsh tones, reiterating old
reproaches--or on a hideous blank of something unremembered, something
that must have made that dark bruise on her shoulder, which aches as she
dressed herself.

Do you wonder how it was that things had come to this pass--what offence
Janet had committed in the early years of marriage to rouse the brutal
hatred of this man? The seeds of things are very small: the hours that
lie between sunrise and the gloom of midnight are travelled through by
tiniest markings of the clock: and Janet, looking back along the fifteen
years of her married life, hardly knew how or where this total misery
began; hardly knew when the sweet wedded love and hope that had set for
ever had ceased to make a twilight of memory and relenting, before the
on-coming of the utter dark.

Old Mrs. Dempster thought she saw the true beginning of it all in Janet's
want of housekeeping skill and exactness. 'Janet,' she said to herself,
'was always running about doing things for other people, and neglecting
her own house. That provokes a man: what use is it for a woman to be
loving, and making a fuss with her husband, if she doesn't take care and
keep his home just as he likes it; if she isn't at hand when he wants
anything done; if she doesn't attend to all his wishes, let them be as
small as they may? That was what I did when I was a wife, though I didn't
make half so much fuss about loving my husband. Then, Janet had no
children.' ... Ah! there Mammy Dempster had touched a true spring, not
perhaps of her son's cruelty, but of half Janet's misery. If she had had
babes to rock to sleep--little ones to kneel in their night-dress and say
their prayers at her knees--sweet boys and girls to put their young arms
round her neck and kiss away her tears, her poor hungry heart would have
been fed with strong love, and might never have needed that fiery poison
to still its cravings. Mighty is the force of motherhood! says the great
trag