The current of time flowed sluggishly on, bringing only changes for the worse to the Jocelyns.  Early spring had come, but no spring-tide hope, and in its stead a bitter humiliation.  The pressure of poverty at last became so great that the Jocelyns were in arrears for rent and were compelled to move.  In this painful ordeal Mrs. Wheaton was a tower of strength, and managed almost everything for them, since no dependence could be placed on Mr. Jocelyn.  The reader’s attention need not be detained by a description of their new shelter—­for it could not be called a home.  They had a living-room and two very small bedrooms in a brick tenement wedged in among others of like unredeemed angularity, and belonging to the semi-respectable, commonplace order.  It was occupied by stolid working-people of various nationalities, and all engaged in an honest scramble for bread, with time and thought for little else.  The house was simply a modern, cheap shelter, built barely within the requirements of the law, and, from its newness, unsoiled as yet with the grime of innumerable crowded families.  Everything was slight, thin, and money-saving in the architecture; and if a child cried, a shrill-tongued woman vociferated, or a laborer, angry or drunk, indulged in the general habit of profanity, all the other inmates of the abode were at once aware of the fact.  By the majority, such sounds were no more heeded than the rumble in the streets, but to poor Mrs. Jocelyn and Mildred, with natures like AEolian harps, the discords of such coarse, crowded life were often horrible.  There was naught to do but exist from day to day, to win what bread they could wherewith to sustain a life that seemed to promise less and less.  Mr. Jocelyn was steadily sinking, and Belle, at last, growing bitter and restless under the privations of her lot, in spite of Roger’s unfaltering friendship.

Mr. Jocelyn was not one who could sin in a conservative, prudent way.  He seemed utterly unable to rally and be a man in his own strength, and his remorse over his conduct was so great that he sought a refuge in almost continuous excess.  The greater the height, the more tremendous the fall, and he had now reached the recklessness of despair.  He had many stolid, slouching neighbors in the tenements, who permitted life to be at least endurable for their families because of the intervals between their excesses; but an interval to Mr. Jocelyn was a foretaste of perdition.  Nevertheless, if the wretched man, by a kindly violence, could have been shut up and away for weeks, perhaps months, from all possibility of obtaining the poisons that were destroying him, and treated with scientific skill, he might have been saved even at this late hour.  When the world recognizes that certain vices sooner or later pass from the character of voluntary evil into the phase of involuntary disease, and should be treated rigorously and radically under the latter aspect, many lives and homes will be saved from final wreck.