Ben isn't balanced
like me, and he goes wrong. He's excitable. I never was. The right kind
of a woman could keep him at home."

After a child came to them matters seemed to mend for a time. So long as
the infant lay pink and helpless in its mother's arms or in its crib, it
was a bond to unite them all.

So soon as it began to be an active child, with naughty ways which
needed correction, it was another element of discord.

The old man did not think Edith capable of controlling the child, and
Ben was hasty and harsh, and he did not like to hear the baby cry. So he
stayed more and more at the store, and was an object of fear to the
child and of reproach to the mother when he did return.

They drifted farther apart, and the old man constantly widened the
breach between them. They had been married six years, and the baby girl
was four years old, when Ben struck Edith a blow, one day, and told her
to take her child and leave the house.

In less than an hour she had gone, no one knew whither.

"She'll come back, more's the pity," the old man said. "'Liz'beth, she
started off to leave me once, but she concluded to come back and try it
over again."

But Edith did not come back. Months afterward they heard of her in a
distant part of the State teaching school and supporting her child.

Ben applied for a divorce on the plea of desertion. Edith never appeared
against him, and he obtained it.

III.

One year from the time Edith left him, he married Abby Wilson. She had
grown into a voluptuous though coarse maturity, and was dashing in dress
and manner. Her father had recently died, leaving her a fine property.
She had always coveted Ben, and did not delay the nuptials from any
sense of delicacy, but rather hastened the hour which should make him
legally her own.

The old man was highly pleased at the turn affairs had taken. After all
these years Ben was united to the woman he had chosen for him so long
ago, and now surely Ben would settle down, and take the care off his
shoulders--shoulders which were beginning to feel the weight of years of
labor. In truth, the old man was breaking down.

He fell ill of a low fever soon after Ben's second marriage, and when he
rose from his bed he seemed to have grown ten years older. He was more
childish in his fault-finding, and more irritable than ever before, and
this new wife of Ben's had little patience with him. She was not at all
like Edith. She bullied him, and frightened