They were engaged and the wedding was all that any bride could have desired. Then ten weeks abroad, beautiful, revealing weeks, for Francis Kent, sober and in love, was much of a man. Still it was only ten weeks before the formal social function, with its inevitable array of wines, turned this kindly, genial lover, in an hour, into a coarse, inconsiderate drunkard. Confined for a week in their state-room on the steamer home with her husband, now a beast in drink, this poor, pure, uninitiated wife realized purgatory. Dark days were those next three years for them both. When sober, he was self-abased by the knowledge of the suffering of this woman he so truly loved, or was restlessly striving against desires which only alcohol could sate; while she was alternately fearing the debauch or fighting to keep her respect and love intact through the debauchery. For him, the battle waged on between love and desire, his love for her--his one inspiration, while desire was constantly reenforced by the taunts of his godless fatalism and the dead weight of his hopelessness. Then came the day which is hallowed in the lives of even the ignorant and coarse, the day in which the young wife gladly suffers through the lengthening hours and goes down to the verge of the Dark River, that in her nearness to death she may find that other life, the everlasting seal of her marriage. In all the beauty of eagerly desired motherhood, Martha Kent bore her baby-boy. The father was not there. She did not then know all. They shielded her. He had been taken the night before to a private asylum, entering his third attack of delirium tremens, and while his wife in pain and prayer made life more sacred, he, struggling and uncontrolled, beast-like, was making life more repulsive. The pain of her motherhood never approached the agony of her wifehood, when she knew, while the pride of fatherhood was utterly submerged in the poignancy of his self-abasement, when he realized.