Mrs. Morris keenly felt her present position. She had belonged to a very respectable family--being naturally of a proud, imperious disposition--and to think that she and her children had been reduced to poverty and rags through the drunken habits of her husband, had almost broken her heart. But this evening, when he came in with the marks on his face which led her to believe he had been engaged in another bar-room brawl--for this was not the first--the sense of their disgrace came upon her with such overwhelming force as to bow her proud spirit to the earth. During the day she had been visited by her sister's husband, whom she had not seen for years, and she had experienced that humiliation which those only can understand who have been in circumstances of comfort, if not of opulence, and through the misconduct of others have been brought to poverty and disgrace, and, under these changed conditions, are visited by those they have known in the days of their prosperity. The early opportunities of her brother-in-law had not been at all superior to that of her husband; but he was now rich, residing in a palatial home, and the thought that he had found her such a victim of poverty and neglect, added to her accumulated bitterness. Her husband, as he sat eating his supper, ever and anon cast his eyes to where she sat--her tears seemed to irritate him more than words could possibly have done. "I don't see, Nell," he said, "why you should sit there sulking after that style. I guess I'll go back to where I came from, I do hate a person to sulk." "I am not sulking, Henry," she replied bitterly; "but I am heart-broken with grief and shame. It was bad enough, surely, for me to be compelled to suffer the disgrace of being a drunkard's wife, and of being, with my children, dragged down from respectability to poverty and rags, without having to endure the thought that my husband--through his drunken, quarrelsome habits--had given people the opportunity to bruit his name through the country as a bar-room bully."