And Constance, what of her, all that time? the reader asks.  It would be a difficult task to give even a feeble idea of all she patiently endured, and of all she suffered.  Not once in that long period did she either see, or hear from her parents.  Three or four times had she written to them, but no answer was returned.  At last she ventured under the yearning anxiety that she felt once more to see her mother, and to hear the voice that lingered in her memory like old familiar music to go to her, and ask her forgiveness and her love.  But she was coldly and cruelly repulsed—­not even being permitted to gain her mother’s presence.

In regard to her husband, her love was like a deep, pure stream.  Its course was never troubled by passion, or obstructed in its onward course.  Though he would come home often and often in a state of stupor from drink—­though it was rarely earlier than midnight when he returned to make glad with his presence her watching and waiting heart, she never felt a reproaching thought.  And to her, his words and tones, and manner, were ever full of tenderness.  Deeply did he love her—­and for her sake more than for his own, was he struggling thus against a powerful current daily exhausting his strength, without moving onward.

Thus much, briefly, of those two years of toil, and struggle, and pain.  On recovering, with a shattered constitution, from the serious attack of illness that had resulted from the abuse of himself during that period, Wilmer felt compelled to give up his fondly-cherished ideas of rising with Constance to the position from which he had dragged her down, and to be content with a humbler lot.  He, therefore, sought, and obtained a situation as a clerk at a salary of eight hundred dollars per annum.  Already he had been compelled to move into a smaller house than the one at first taken, and in this he was now able to remain.

But seeing, with a clearer vision than before, Wilmer perceived that much of the bloom had faded from his wife’s young cheek, and that her heart had not ceased to yearn for the home and loved ones of her earlier years.

Another year passed away, and during the whole of that time not one word of kindness or censure reached the ears of Constance from her parents.  They seemed to have not only cast her off, abut to have forgotten the fact of her existence.  To a mind like that of Theodore Wilmer’s, any condition in which a beloved one was made to suffer keenly, and as he believed, alone through him, could not be endured without serious inroads upon a shattered constitution; and much to his alarm, by the end of the year he found that he was less able than usual to attend through the whole day to the fatiguing duties of the counting-room.  Frequently he would return home at night with a pain in his breast, that often continued accompanied by a troublesome cough through a greater part of the night.  The morning, too, often found him feverish and debilitated, and with no appetite.