Rising at length, Ellis began dressing himself, purposely making sufficient noise to reach the ears of his wife.  But she did not make her appearance.

Two doors led from the chamber in which he was.  One communicated with the adjoining room, used as a nursery, and the other with the passage.  After Ellis had dressed and shaved himself, he was, for a short time, undecided whether to enter the nursery, in which were his wife and children, or to pass through the other door, and leave the house without seeing them.

“I shall only get my feelings hurt,” said he, as he stood debating the point.  “It’s a poor compensation for trouble and the lack of domestic harmony, to get drunk, I know; and I ought to be, and am, ashamed of my own folly.  Oh dear! what is to become of me?  Why will not Cara see the evil consequences of the way she acts upon her husband?  If I go to destruction, and the chances are against me, the sin will mainly rest upon her.  Yet why should I say this?  Am I not man enough to keep sober?  Yes”—­thus he went on talking to himself—­“but if she will not act in some sort of unity with me, I shall be ruined in my business.  It will never do to maintain our present expensive mode of living; and she will never hear to a change.”

Just at this moment an angry exclamation from the lips of Mrs. Ellis came sharply on the ears of her husband, followed by the whipping and crying of one of the children, who had, as far as Ellis could gather, from what was said, overset his mother’s work-basket.

“No use for me to go in there,” muttered the unhappy man.  “I shall only increase the storm; and I’ve had storms enough!”

So he went from the chamber by way of the passage, descended to the entry below, and, taking up his hat, left the house.

Now, of all things in the world, in the peculiar state of body and mind in which Ellis then was, did he want a good strong cup of coffee at his own table, and a kind, forbearing, loving wife to set it before him.  These would have given to his body and to his mind just what both needed, for the trials and temptations of the day; and they would have saved him, at least for the day, perhaps for life; for the pivot upon which the whole of a man’s future destiny turns is often small, and scarcely noticed.

As Ellis stepped from his door, and received the fresh air upon his face and in his lungs, he was instantly conscious of a want in his system, and a craving for something to supply that want.  Having taken no breakfast, the feeling was not to be wondered at.  Ellis understood its meaning, in part, and took the nearest way to an eating-house where he ordered something to eat.  For him, it was the most natural thing in the world, under the circumstances, to call for something at the bar while his breakfast was preparing.  He felt better after taking a glass of brandy.

Ellis had finished his breakfast, and was standing at the bar with a second glass of liquor in his hand, when he was accosted in a familiar manner by the same individual who had lured Wilkinson to the gaming-table.