llowed he sat down and began to weep
again for Liza.

It was nearly midnight. Only Travis, Charley Biggers and Jud remained
sober enough to talk. Charley was telling of Tilly and her wondrous
beauty.

"Now--it's this way," he hiccoughed--"I've got to go off to
school--but--but--I've thought of a plan to marry her first, with a
bogus license and preacher."

There was a whispered conversation among them, ending in a shout of
applause.

"What's the matter with you takin' yo' queen at the same time?" asked
Jud of Travis.

Travis, drunk as he was, winced to think that he would ever permit
Jud Carpenter to suggest what he had intended should only be known to
himself. His tongue was thick, his brain whirled, and there were gaps
in his thoughts; but through the thickness and heaviness he thought
how low he had fallen. Lower yet when, despite all his vanishing
reserve, all his dignity and exclusiveness, he laughed sillily and
said:

"Just what I had decided to do--two queens and an ace."

They all cheered drunkenly.

CHAPTER VII

MRS. WESTMORE TAKES A HAND

"What are you playing, Alice?"

The daughter arose from the piano and kissed her mother, holding for
a moment the pretty face, crowned with white hair, between her two
palms.

"It--it is an old song which Tom and I used to love to sing."

The last of the sentence came so slowly that it sank almost into
silence, as of one beginning a sentence and becoming so absorbed in
the subject as to forget the speech. Then she turned again to the
piano, as if to hide from her mother the sorrow which had crept into
her face.

"You should cease to think of that. Such things are dreams--at
present we are confronted by very disagreeable realities."

"Dreams--ah, mother mine"--she answered with forced cheeriness--"but
what would life be without them?"

"For one thing, Alice"--and she took the daughter's place at the
piano and began to play snatches of an old waltz tune--"it would be
free from all the morbid unnaturalness, the silliness, the froth of
things. There is too much hardness in every life--in the world--in
the very laws of life, for such things ever to have been part of the
original plan. For my part, I think they are the product of man and
wine or women or morphine or some other narcotic."

"We make the dreams of life, but the realities of it make us," she
added.

"Oh, no, mother. 'Tis the dreams that make the realities. Not a great
established fac