He had already begun to shrink from the companionship of his family. The play and voices of his little children jarred his shattered nerves almost beyond endurance; and every look of love and act of trust became a stinging irritant instead of the grateful incense that had once filled his home with perfume. In bitter self-condemnation he saw that he was ceasing to be a protector to his daughters, and that unless he could break the dark, self-woven spells he would drag them down to the depths of poverty, and then leave them exposed to the peculiar temptations which, in a great city, ever assail girls so young, beautiful, and friendless. Mildred, he believed, would die rather than sin; but he often groaned in spirit as he thought of Belle. Their considerate self-denial that he might not be disturbed after his return from business, and their looks of solicitude, pierced him daily with increasing torture; and the knowledge that he added to the monotony of their lives and the irksomeness of their poverty oppressed him with a dejection that was relieved only by the cause of all his troubles. But the thought of his loving, trusting, patient wife was the most unendurable of all. He had loved her from the first as his own soul, and her love and respect were absolutely essential to him, and yet he was beginning to recoil from her with a strange and unnatural force. He felt that he had no right to touch her while she remained so true and he was so false. He dreaded her loving gaze more than a detective's cold, searching eye. He had already deceived her in regard to the marks of the hypodermic needle, assuring her that they were caused by a slight impurity in his blood, and she never questioned anything he said. He often lay awake through interminable nights--the drug was fast losing its power to produce quiet sleep--trembling and cold with apprehension of the hour when she would become aware that her husband was no longer a man, but the most degraded of slaves. She might learn that she was leaning, not even on a frail reed, but on a poisoned weapon that would pierce her heart. It seemed to him that he would rather die than meet that hour when into her gentle eyes would come the horror of the discovery, and in fact the oft-recurring thought of it all had caused more pain than a hundred deaths. Could he go home now and reveal his degradation? Great drops of cold perspiration drenched him at the bare thought. The icy waters, the ooze and mud of the river seemed preferable. He could not openly continue his vice in the presence of his family, nor could he conceal it much longer, and the attempt to stop the drug, even gradually, would transform him almost into a demon of irritability and perhaps violence, so frightful is the rebellion of the physical nature against the abstinence essential to a final cure.