took the paper and glanced at it. She flushed and thrust it
into her pocket. They were silent a while and Mrs. Westmore sat
thinking of the past. Alice knew it by the great reminiscent light
which gleamed in her eyes. She thought of the time when she had
servants, money, friends unlimited--of the wealth and influence of
her husband--of the glory of Westmoreland.

Every one has some secret ambition kept from the eyes of every living
soul--often even to die in its keeper's breast. It is oftenest a mean
ambition of which one is ashamed and so hides it from the world. It
is often the one weakness. Alice never knew what was her mother's.
She did not indeed know that she had one, for this one thing Mrs.
Westmore had kept inviolately secret. But in her heart there had
always rankled a secret jealousy when she thought of The Gaffs. It
had been there since she could remember--a feeling cherished
secretly, too, by her husband: for in everything their one idea had
been that Westmoreland should surpass The Gaffs,--that it should be
handsomer, better kept, more prosperous, more famous.

Now, Westmoreland was gone--this meant the last of it. It would be
sold, even the last hundred acres of it, with the old home on it.
Gone--gone--all her former glory--all her family tradition, her
memories, her very name.

Gone, and The Gaffs remained!

Remained in all its intactness--its beauty--its well equipped barns
with all the splendor of its former days. For so great was the
respect of Schofield's army for the character of Colonel Jeremiah
Travis that his home escaped the torch when it was applied to many
others in the Tennessee Valley. And Richard Travis had been shrewd
enough after the war to hold his own. Joining the party of the negro
after the war, he had been its political ruler in the county. And the
Honorable Richard Travis had been offered anything he wanted. At
present he was State Senator. He with others called himself a
Republican--one of the great party of Lincoln to which the negroes
after their enfranchisement united themselves. It was a fearful
misnomer. The Republican party in the South, composed of ninety-nine
ignorant negroes to one renegade white, about as truly represented
the progressive party of Lincoln as a black vampire the ornithology
of all lands. Indeed, since the war, there has never been in the
South either a Republican or a Democratic party. The party line is
not drawn on belief but on race and color. The wh