ite men, believing
everything they please from free trade to protection, vote a ticket
which they call Democratic. The negroes, and a few whites who allied
themselves with them for the spoils of office, vote the other ticket.
Neither of them represent anything but a race issue.

To this negro party belonged Richard Travis--and the price of his
infamy had been _Honorable_ before his name.

But Mrs. Westmore cared nothing for this. She only knew that he was a
leader of men, was handsome, well reared and educated, and that he
owned The Gaffs, her old rival. And that there it stood, a fortune--a
refuge--a rock--offered to her and her daughter, offered by a man
who, whatever his other faults, was brave and dashing, sincere in his
idolatrous love for her daughter. That he would make Alice happy she
did not doubt; for Mrs. Westmore's idea of happiness was in having
wealth and position and a splendid name. Having no real heart, how
was it possible for her to know, as Alice could know, the happiness
of love?

An eyeless fish in the river of Mammoth Cave might as well try to
understand what light meant.

He would make Alice happy, of course he would; he would make her happy
by devotion, which he was eager to give her with an unstinted hand.
Alice needed it, she herself needed it. It was common sense to accept
it,--business sense. It was opportunity--fate. It was the reward of a
life--the triumph of it--to have her old rival--enemy--bound and
presented to her.

And nothing stood between her and the accomplishment of it all but the
foolish romance of her daughter's youth.

And so she sat building her castles and thinking:

"With The Gaffs, with Richard Travis and his money would come all I
wish, both for her and for me. Once more I would hold the social
position I once held: once more I would be something in the world.
And Alice, of course, she would be happy; for her's is one of those
trusting natures which finds first where her duty points and then
makes her heart follow."

But Mrs. Westmore wisely kept silent. She did not think aloud. She
knew too well that Alice's sympathetic, unselfish, obedient spirit
was thinking it over.

She sat down by her mother and took up a pet kitten which had come
purring in, begging for sympathy. She stroked it thoughtfully.

Mrs. Westmore read her daughter's thoughts:

"So many people," the mother said after a while, "have false ideas of
love and marriage. Like ignorant people when t