Long before the period of which I am now writing, Haller had become drunken and very lazy.  Their comfortable house and furniture had been changed for poor rooms, with little in them, except what was barely necessary.  The oldest child, a son, about nineteen years of age, on to whose maturity the mother had often looked with a lively hope, following the example of his father, had become idle and dissipated; spending most of his time in low taverns and gambling-shops.  Here was a keen sorrow which no heart but a mother’s can understand.  Oh, what a darkening of all the dreams of early years!  When a warm-hearted girl, looking into the pleasant future with a tremulous joy, she stood beside her chosen one at the altar, how little did she dream of the shadows and darkness that were to fall upon her path!  And alas! how little does many a careless girl, who gives herself away, thoughtlessly, to a young man of unformed character, dream of the sorrow too deep for tears that awaits her.  Surely this were anguish enough,—­and surely it called for the sustaining sympathy of friends.  But the friend of her early years, the sister in whose arms, in the days of innocent childhood, she had slept peacefully, now turned from her coldly, and even repulsively.

So unnatural and revolting seems the picture I am drawing, even in its dim outlines, that I turn from it myself, half-resolved to leave it unfinished.  But many reasons, stronger than feeling, urge me to complete my task with the imperfect skill I possess, and I take the pencil which I had laid down in shame and disgust, and proceed to fill up more distinctly.

I had observed for some time the growing coolness of Mrs. Williams towards her unfortunate sister, and had noted more than once the deep dejection of Mrs. Haller’s manner, whenever she went away from our house.  She began to come less and less frequently, and her children at still more remote intervals.  Things became desperate with her at length, and she came, forced by necessity, to seek a little aid and comfort in her sorrow from her once kind sister, and with the faint hope that some relief would be offered.  I was sitting in the neatly furnished breakfast-room, one evening, a little after tea, reading a book, when Mrs Haller came in.  She had on a dark calico dress, faded, but clean, a rusty shawl that had once been black, and a bonnet that Mrs. Williams’s kitchen-servant would not have worn.  My eye instinctively glanced to the face of Mrs. Williams as she entered; it had at once contracted into a cold and forbidding expression.  She neither rose from her chair, nor asked Mrs. Haller to take one, greeting her only with a chilling “well, Sally.”  The latter naturally sought a chair, and waited silently, and surely with an aching heart, for a kinder manifestation of sisterly regard.  I immediately left the room; but learned afterwards enough of the interview to make it distinct to the imagination of the reader.

The sisters sat silent for some moments, the one vainly trying to keep down the struggling anguish of a stricken heart, and the other, half-angry at the intrusion, endeavouring to fashion a form of greeting that should convey her real impressions, without being verbally committed.  At length the latter said, half-kindly, half-repulsively:—­