While his wife sat leaning upon the table, her face hidden, she was the picture of despair; and, in truth, she felt almost as if she were turning into stone.  If her husband had been brought home a mangled, mutilated man, as she often feared he might be during the long years of the war, she would have bent over him with a tenderness equalled only by the pride and faith that had ever found in him their centre; but this strange apparition of a man with odd, sinister-looking eyes, who alternately threatened and cowered before her—­this man, mutilated more horribly in the loss of truth and love, who was thus openly and shamelessly lying—­oh, was he the chivalric, noble friend, who had been lover and husband for so many years!  The contrast was intolerable, and the sense of his falseness stung her almost to madness.  She did not yet know that opium, like the corruption of the grave, blackens that which is the fairest and whitest.

For a few minutes Mr. Jocelyn debated with himself.  Was he strong enough to go out to the nearest drug store?  After one or two turns up and down the room he found that he was not.  He might fall in utter collapse while on the way, and yet his system, depleted by his recent excess, demanded the drug with an intensity which he could not restrain much longer without becoming wild and reckless.  He therefore said to his wife, in a dogged manner, “Nan, I must have that medicine.”

The gentle creature was at last goaded into such a burst of indignation that for a few moments he was appalled, and trembled before her.  The fire in her blue eyes seemed to scorch away her tears, and standing before him she said passionately, “As you are a man and a Southern gentleman, tell me the truth.  I never concealed a thought from you; what have you been concealing from us for weeks and months?  I wronged you in that I did not think and plan. day and night how to save instead of how to spend, and I can never forgive myself, but my fault was not deliberate, not intentional.  There was never a moment when I tried to deceive you—­never a moment when I would not have suffered hunger and cold that you and the children might be warmed and fed.  What is this tonic for which you are bartering your health, your honor and ours, your children’s bread and blood?  Mildred sold her girlhood’s gifts, the few dear mementoes of the old happy days, that you might have the chance you craved.  That money was as sacred as the mercy of God.  For weeks the poor child has earned her bread, not by the sweat of her face, but in agony of body and unhappiness of heart.  If it were disease that had so cast us down and shadowed our lives with fear, pain, and poverty, we would have submitted to God’s will and watched over you with a patient tenderness that would never have faltered or murmured; but it’s not disease, it’s not something that God sent.  It is that which crimsons our faces with shame.”

He sat cowering and trembling before her, with his face buried in his hands.