and the old preacher of Cottontown.

When Helen Conway, after supper, sought her drunken father and
learned that he really intended to have Lily and herself go into the
cotton mills, she was crushed for the first time in her life.

An hour later she sent a boy with a note to The Gaffs to Harry
Travis.

He brought back an answer that made her pale with wounded love and
grief. Not even Mammy Maria knew why she had crept off to bed. But in
the night the old woman heard sobs from the young girl's room where
she and her sister slept.

"What is it, chile?" she asked as she slipped from her own cot in the
adjoining little room and went in to Helen's.

The girl had been weeping all night--she had no mother--no one to
whom she could unbosom her heart--no one but the old woman who had
nursed her from her infancy. This kind old creature sat on the bed
and held the girl's sobbing head on her lap and stroked her cheek.
She knew and understood--she asked no questions:

"It isn't that I must work in the mill," she sobbed to the old
woman--"I can do that--anything to help out--but--but--to think that
Harry loves me so little as to give me up for--for--that."

"Don't cry, chile," said Mammy soothingly--"It ain't registered that
you gwine wuck in that mill yit--I ain't made my afferdavit yit."

"But Harry doesn't love me--Oh, he doesn't love me," she wept. "He
would not give me up for anything if he did."

"I'm gwine give that Marse Harry a piece of my mind when I see
him--see if I don't. Don't you cry, chile--hold up yo' haid an' be a
Conway. Don't you ever let him know that yo' heart is bustin' for him
an' fo' the year is out we'll have that same Marse Harry acrawlin' on
his very marrow bones to aix our forgiveness. See if we won't."

It was poor consolation to the romantic spirit of Helen Conway.
Daylight found her still heart-broken and sobbing in the old woman's
lap.

PART THIRD--THE GIN

CHAPTER I

ALICE WESTMORE

It is remarkable how small a part of our real life the world
knows--how little our most intimate friends know of the secret
influences which have proven to be climaxes, at the turning points of
our existence.

There was no more beautiful woman in Alabama than Alice Westmore; and
throughout that state, where the song birds seem to develop,
naturally, along with the softness of the air, and the gleam of the
sunshine, and the lullaby of the Gulf's soft breeze among the pine
trees, there wa