In a moment her son had his arms around her neck, and said: "Oh, moder, don't cry, don't cry. Mr. Fleet said God would surely help us in time of trouble if we would only ask Him." "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. Turning to the wall where hung a noble picture, a lovely landscape, whose rich coloring, warm sunlight, and rural peace formed a sharp, strange contrast with the meagre, famine-stricken apartment, he was about to take it down from its fastening when his hand was arrested by a word--"Father!" He turned, and saw his son looking at him with his great eyes full of horror and alarm, as if he were committing a murder. "I tell you I must, and I vill," said he, savagely. His wife looked up, sprang to his side, and with her hands upon his arm, said, "No, Berthold, you must not, you shall not sell dot picture." He silently pointed to his children crying for bread.