“Why Mrs. Gladstone,” said Miss Tabitha, “you are as zealous as a new convert to the cause of woman suffrage. We single women who are constantly taxed without being represented, know what it is to see ignorance and corruption striking hands together and voting away our money for whatever purposes they choose. I pay as large a tax as many of the men in A.P., and yet cannot say who shall assess my property for a single year.”

“And there is another thing,” said Mrs. Gladstone, “ought to be brought to the consideration of the men, and it is this. They refuse to let us vote and yet fail to protect our homes from the ravages of rum. My young friend, whom I said died of starvation; foolishly married a dissipated man who happened to be rich and handsome. She was gentle, loving, sensitive to a fault. He was querulous, fault-finding and irritable, because his nervous system was constantly unstrung by liquor. She lacked tenderness, sympathy and heart support, and at last faded and died, not starvation of the body, but a trophy of the soul, and when I say the law helped, I mean it licensed the places that kept the temptation ever in his way. And I fear, that is the secret of Jeanette’s faded looks, and unhappy bearing.”

No Jeanette was not happy. Night after night would she pace the floor of her splendidly furnished chamber waiting and watching for her husband’s footsteps. She and his friends had hoped that her influence would be strong enough to win him away from his boon companions, that his home and beautiful bride would present superior attractions to Anderson’s saloon, his gambling pool, and champaign suppers, and for a while they did, but soon the novelty wore off, and Jeanette found out to her great grief that her power to bind him to the simple attractions of home were as futile as a rôle of cobwebs to moor a ship to the shore, when it has drifted out and is dashing among the breakers. He had learned to live an element of excitement, and to depend upon artificial stimulation, until it seemed as if the very blood in his veins grew sluggish fictitious excitement was removed. His father, hopeless of his future, had dissolved partnership with him, and for months there had been no communication between them; and Jeanette saw with agony and dismay that his life was being wrecked upon the broad sea of sin and shame.

“Where is his father? The child can’t live. It is one of the worst cases of croup I have had this year, why didn’t you send for me sooner? Where is his father? It is now just twelve o’clock, time for all respectable men to be in the house,” said the bluff but kind hearted family doctor looking tenderly upon Jeanette’s little boy who lay gasping for breath in the last stages of croup.

“Oh! I don’t know,” said Jeanette her face crimsoning beneath the doctor’s searching glance. “I suppose he is down to Anderson’s.”

“Anderson’s!” said the doctor in a tone of hearty indignation, “what business has he there, and his child dying here?”

“But doctor, he didn’t know, the child had fever when he went out, but neither of us thought much of it till I was awakened by his strange and unnatural breathing. I sent for you as soon as I could rouse the servants.” “Well rouse them again, and tell them to go down to Anderson’s and tell your husband that his child is dying.”

“Oh! no not dying doctor, you surely don’t mean it.” “Yes Jeanette,” said the old family doctor, tenderly and sadly, “I can do nothing for him, let me take him in my arms and rest you. Dear little darling, he will be saved from the evils to come.”

Just as his life was trembling on its frailest chords, and its delicate machinery almost wound up, Charles Romaine returned, sober enough to take in the situation. He strode up to the dying child, took the clammy hands in his, and said in a tone of bitter anguish, “Charlie, don’t you know papa? Wouldn’t you speak one little word to papa?” But it was too late, the shadows that never deceive flitted over the pale beauty of the marble brow, the waxen lid closed over the once bright and laughing eye, and the cold grave for its rest had won the child.