Edward, also, was unwearied in his attention to his old classmate; though each of them had, as if by tacit consent, avoided all reference to their former intimacy. When they were alone Paul could not refrain from speaking of Gertrude, though every word seemed to rend his heart asunder. "She says she forgives me; but how can she? You saw how I neglected her for others, whose attractions were nothing in comparison to hers, but you never suspected one half the torture to which I subjected her. Not that such was my intention; but I had been taught at home that all women were inferiors. Mother and sisters always yielded to me. I was moody and irritable, often giving her a harsh word, when I ought to have been most considerate and kind." One day when the sick man seemed unusually feeble, Gertrude brought in a glass of wine and smilingly told him the physician had ordered it. "Take it away!" he exclaimed with a shudder. "The love of stimulating drinks has been my ruin." "Mrs. Wallingford," he went on, for the first time addressing her by this title, "did you never suspect what it was that made me so irritable, so unjust; so much more like a fiend than like the tender husband I had promised to be?" "Yes, Paul, I knew that you loved wine, and drank more than was good for you." "I did. I learned to drink a glass or two at our club, before you came to Chicago. It did not affect me as it does many. I never staggered, or lost my consciousness; but I thought it quickened my intellectual powers. If I were going to plead a case I took an extra quantity. Many called my pleading a brilliant success. I knew that it was the excitement of liquor. The secondary effect was on my temper; and as I dared not vent my irritability on others, I tortured my poor long-suffering wife." "It was this; and the consciousness that some of my clients began to class me with intemperate men that led me to accept Mr. Curtis' proposition to accompany him to Europe." "No, no, I will never touch my lips to the wineglass. When I think what I have lost by it, I loathe and abhor it as I loathe and abhor myself. I might have been the happiest husband and father in the world; but I was blind! I was blind!" As he had never made the most distant allusion to her letter announcing the birth of little Paul, she had been urged by her brother to make no mention of the child. Indeed, she was not sure she could control her own emotions if the subject were introduced.