By this time he was a good deal sobered, and sadder for his sobriety; for, as his mind became clearer, he remembered, with more vividness, the events of the day, and particularly the fact of having lost several hundred dollars to his pretended friend, Carlton.

“Whither am I going?  Where is this to end?” was his shuddering ejaculation, as the imminent peril of his position most vividly presented itself.

How hopelessly he wended his reluctant way homeward!  There was nothing to lean upon there.  No strength of ever-enduring love, to be, as it were, a second self to him in his weakness.  No outstretched arm to drag him, with something of super-human power, out of the miry pit into which he had fallen; but, instead, an indignant hand to thrust him farther in.

“God help me!” he sighed, in the very bitterness of a hopeless spirit; “for there is no aid in man.”

Ah! if, in his weakness, he had only leaned, in true dependence, on Him he thus asked to help him; if he had but resisted the motions of evil in himself, as sins against his Maker, and resisted them in a determined spirit, he need not have fallen; strength would, assuredly, have been given.

The nearer Ellis drew to his home, the more unhappy he felt at the thought of meeting his wife.  After having left the house without seeing her in the morning, and then remaining from home all day, he had no hope of a kind reception.

“It’s no use!” he muttered to himself, stopping suddenly, when within a square of his house.  “I can’t meet Cara; she will look coldly at me, or frown, or speak cutting words; and I’m in no state of mind to bear any thing patiently just now.  I’ve done wrong, I know—­very wrong; but I don’t want it thrown into my face.  Oh, dear!  I am beset within and without, behind and before and there is little hope for me.”

Overcoming this state of indecision, Ellis forced himself to go home.  On entering the presence of his wife, he made a strong effort to compose himself, and, when he met Cara, he spoke to her in a cheerful tone of voice.  How great an effort it cost him to do this, considering all the circumstances by which he was surrounded, the reader may easily imagine.  And what was his reception?

“Found your way home at last!”

These were the words with which Cara received her husband; and they were spoken in a sharp, deriding tone of voice.  The day’s doubt, suspense, and suffering, had not quieted the evil spirit in her heart.  She was angry with her husband, and could not restrain its expression.

A bitter retort trembled on the tongue of Ellis; but he checked its utterance, and, turning from his wife, took one of his children in his arms.  The sphere of innocence that surrounded the spirit of that child penetrated his heart, and touched his feelings with an emotion of tenderness.

“Oh, wretched man that I am!” he sighed, in the bitterness of a repentant and self-upbraiding spirit.  “So much dependent on me, and yet as weak as a reed swaying in the wind.”