“God be thanked!” murmured the poor drunkard, as he led his child away.  “God be thanked!  There is hope for me yet.”

Hardly had the mother of Lizzie missed her child, ere she entered, leading her father by the hand.

“O, mother!” she exclaimed, with a joy-lit countenance, and in a voice of exultation, “Mr. Jenks has promised.”

“Promised what?” Hope sprung up in her heart, on wild and fluttering wings, her face flushed, and then grew deadly pale.  She sat panting for a reply.

“That he would never sell me another glass of liquor,” said her husband.

A pair of thin, white hands were clasped quickly together, an ashen face was turned upwards, tearless eyes looked their thankfulness to heaven.

“There is hope yet, Ellen,” said Leslie.

“Hope, hope!  And O, Edward, you have said the word!”

“Hope, through our child.  Innocence has prevailed over vice and cruelty.  She came to the strong, evil, passionate man, and, in her weakness and innocence, prevailed over him.  God made her fearless and eloquent.”

A year afterwards a stranger came again that way, and stopped at the “Stag and Hounds.”  As before, Jenks was behind his well-filled bar, and drinking customers came and went in numbers.  Jenks did not recognize him until he called for water, and drank a full tumbler of the pure liquor with a hearty zest.  Then he knew him, but feigned to be ignorant of his identity.  The stranger made no reference to the scene he had witnessed there a twelvemonth before, but lingered in the bar for most of the day, closely observing every one that came to drink.  Leslie was not among the number.

“What has become of the man and the little girl I saw here, at my last visit to Milanville?” said the stranger, speaking at last to Jenks.

“Gone to the devil, for all I care,” was the landlord’s rude answer, as he turned off from his questioner.

“For all you care, no doubt,” said the stranger to himself.  “Men often speak their real thoughts in a passion.”

“Do you see that little white cottage away off there, just at the edge of the wood?  Two tall poplars stand in front.”

Thus spoke to the stranger one who had heard him address the landlord.

“I do.  What of it?” he answered.

“The man you asked for lives there.”

“Indeed!”

“And what is more, if he keeps on as he has begun, the cottage will be all his own in another year.  Jenks, here, doesn’t feel any good blood for him, as you may well believe.  A poor man’s prosperity is regarded as so much loss to him.  Leslie is a good mechanic—­one of the best in Milanville.  He can earn twelve dollars a week, year in and year out.  Two hundred dollars he has already paid on his cottage; and as he is that much richer, Jenks thinks himself just so much poorer; for all this surplus, and more too, would have gone into his till, if Leslie had not quit drinking.”