Poor Janet! how heavily the months rolled on for her, laden with fresh sorrows as the summer 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 tragic poet to us across the ages, finding, as usual, the simplest words for the sublimest fact—­[Greek:  deinon to tiktein estin.] It transforms all things by its vital heat:  it turns timidity into fierce courage, and dreadless defiance into tremulous submission; it turns thoughtlessness into foresight, and yet stills all anxiety into calm content; it makes selfishness become self-denial, and gives even to hard vanity the glance of admiring love.  Yes! if Janet had been a mother, she might have been saved from much sin, and therefore from much of her sorrow.