"Oh, Ernest, how kind, how forgiving you are?", I cried, running into the arms he held out to me, "If you knew how ashamed, how sorry, I am!" "And if you only knew how ashamed and sorry I am!" he returned. "I ought to have seen how you taxing and over-taxing yourself, doing your work and Martha's too. It must not go on so." By this time, with a veil over my face, he had got me downstairs and out into the air, which fanned my fiery cheeks and cooled my heated brain. It seemed to me that I have had all this tempest about nothing at all, and that with a character still so undisciplined, I was utterly unworthy to be either a wife or a mother. But when I tried to say so in broken words, Ernest comforted me with the gentleness and tenderness of a woman. "Your character is not undisciplined, my darling," he said. "Your nervous organization is very peculiar, and you have had unusual cares and trials from the beginning of our married life. I ought not to have confronted you with my father's debts at a moment when you had every reason to look forward to freedom from most petty economies and cares." "Don't say so," I interrupted. "If you had not told me you had this draft on your resources I should have always suspected you of meanness. For you know, dear, you have kept me-that is to say-you could not help it, but I suppose men can't understand how many demands are made upon a mother for money almost every day. I got along very well till the children came, but since then it has been very hard." "Yes," he said, "I am sure it has. But let me finish what I was going to say. I want you to make a distinction for yourself, which I make for you, between mere ill-temper, and the irritability that is the result of a goaded state of the nerves. Until you do that, nothing can be done to relieve you from what I am sure, distresses and grieves you exceedingly. Now, I suppose that whenever you speak to me or the children in this irritated way you lose your own self-respect, for the time, at least, and feel degraded in the sight of God also." "Oh, Ernest! there are no words in any language that mean enough to express the anguish I feel when I speak quick, impatient words to you, the one human being in the universe whom I love with all my heart and soul, and to my darling little children who are almost as dear! I pray and mourn over it day and night. God only knows how I hate myself on account of this one horrible sin!" "It is a sin only as you deliberately and wilfully fulfill the conditions that lead to such results. Now I am sure if you could once make up your mind in the fear of God, never to undertake more work of any sort than you can carry on calmly, quietly, without hurry or flurry, and the instant you find yourself growing nervous and like one out of breath, would stop and take breath, you would find this simple, common-sense rule doing for you what no prayers or tears could ever accomplish. Will you try it for one month, my darling?"