Two years from the period of their marriage, Elliott and his wife were seated in a small room moderately well furnished. He was leaning back in a chair, with arms folded, and his chin resting on his bosom. His face was contracted into a gloomy scowl. Anna, who looked pale and troubled, was sewing and touching with her foot a cradle, in which was a babe. The little one seemed restless. Every now and then it would start and moan, or cry out. After a time it awoke and commenced screaming. The mother lifted it from the cradle and tried to hush it upon her bosom, but the babe still cried on. It was evidently in pain. "Confound you! why don't you keep that child quiet?" exclaimed the husband, impatiently casting at the same time an angry look upon his wife. Anna made no reply, but turned half away from him, evidently to conceal the tears that suddenly started from her eyes, and strove more earnestly to quiet the child. In this she soon succeeded. "I believe you let her cry on purpose, whenever I am in the house, just to annoy me," her husband resumed in an ill-natured tone. "No, Thomas, you know that I do not," Anna said. "Say I lie, why don't you?" "Oh, Thomas, how can you speak so to me?" And his young wife turned toward him an earnest, tearful look. "Pah! don't try to melt me with your crying. I never believed in it. Women can cry at any moment." There was a convulsive motion of Mrs. Elliott's head as she turned quickly away, and a choking sound in her throat. She remained silent, ten minutes passed, when her husband said in a firm voice, "Anna, I'm going to break up." Mrs. Elliott glanced around with a startled air. "It's true, just what I say--your father may think that I'm going to make a slave of myself to support you, but he's mistaken. He's refused to help me in my business one single copper, though he's able enough. And now I've taken my resolution. You can go back to him as quick as you like." Before the brutal husband had half finished the sentence, his wife was on her feet, with a cheek deadly pale, and eyes almost starting from her head. Thomas Elliott was her husband and the father of her babe, and as such she had loved him with a far deeper love than he had deserved. This had caused her to bear with coldness and neglect, and even positive unkindness without a complaint. Sacredly had she kept from her mother even a hint of the truth. Thus had she gone on almost from the first; for only a few months elapsed before she discovered that her image was dim on her husband's heart. "You needn't stand there staring at me like one moon-struck"--he said, with bitter sarcasm and a curl of the lip. "What I say is the truth. I'm going to give up, and you've got to go home to them that are more able to support you than I am; and who have a better right, too, I'm thinking."