But the thought of his loving, trusting, patient wife was the most unendurable of all.  He had loved her from the first as his own soul, and her love and respect were absolutely essential to him, and yet he was beginning to recoil from her with a strange and unnatural force.  He felt that he had no right to touch her while she remained so true and he was so false.  He dreaded her loving gaze more than a detective’s cold, searching eye.  He had already deceived her in regard to the marks of the hypodermic needle, assuring her that they were caused by a slight impurity in his blood, and she never questioned anything he said.  He often lay awake through interminable nights—­the drug was fast losing its power to produce quiet sleep—­trembling and cold with apprehension of the hour when she would become aware that her husband was no longer a man, but the most degraded of slaves.  She might learn that she was leaning, not even on a frail reed, but on a poisoned weapon that would pierce her heart.  It seemed to him that he would rather die than meet that hour when into her gentle eyes would come the horror of the discovery, and in fact the oft-recurring thought of it all had caused more pain than a hundred deaths.

Could he go home now and reveal his degradation?  Great drops of cold perspiration drenched him at the bare thought.  The icy waters, the ooze and mud of the river seemed preferable.  He could not openly continue his vice in the presence of his family, nor could he conceal it much longer, and the attempt to stop the drug, even gradually, would transform him almost into a demon of irritability and perhaps violence, so frightful is the rebellion of the physical nature against the abstinence essential to a final cure.

At last he matured and carried out the following plan:  Returning to the firm that had employed him, he told them of his purpose to go South among his old acquaintances and begin life anew, and of his belief that a sea voyage and change of scene would enable him to break the habit; and he so worked upon their sympathies that they promised to say nothing of his weakness, and not to let the past stand in his way if he would redeem himself.

Then fortifying his nerves carefully with morphia he went home and broached the project to his wife and Mildred, plausibly advancing the idea that the change might restore his failing health.  To his relief they did not oppose his scheme, for indeed they felt that something must be done speedily to arrest his decline; and although the separation would be hard for the wife to endure, and would become a source of increased anxiety for a time, it was much better than seeing him fail so steadily before her eyes.  His plan promised improvement in their fortunes and cure of the mysterious disease that was slowly sapping his life.  Therefore she tearfully consented that he should go, and if the way opened favorably it was decided that the family should follow him.