"I've ask Him, and ask Him, but der help don't come. I can do no more;"
and a tempest of despairing sobs shook her gaunt frame.

The boy seemed to have got past tears, and just fixed his large eyes,
full of reproach and sorrow, on his father.

The man rose and turned his bloodshot eyes slowly around the room. The
whole scene, with its meaning, seemed to dawn upon him. His mind was
not so clouded by the fumes of liquor but that he could comprehend the
supreme misery of the situation. He heard his children crying--fairly
howling for bread. He saw the wife he had sworn to love and honor,
where she had fallen in her unequal conflict, brave, but overpowered.
He remembered the wealthy burgher's blooming, courted daughter, whom
he had lured away to marry him, a poor artist. He remembered how, in
spite of her father's commands and her mother's tears, she had left
home and luxury to follow him throughout the world because of her faith
in him and love for him--how under her inspiration he had risen to
great promise as an artist, till fame and fortune became almost
a certainty, and then, under the debasing influence of his terrible
appetite, he had dragged her down and down, till now he saw
her--prematurely old, broken in health, broken in heart--fall helplessly
before the hard drudgery that she no longer had strength to perform.
With a sickening horror he remembered that he had taken even the
pittance she had wrung from that washtub, to feed, not his children,
but his accursed appetite for drink. Even his purple, bloated face
grew livid as all the past rushed upon him, and despair laid an icy
hand upon his heart.

A desperate purpose formed itself within his mind.