yed, much-pleated shirt-front. His
stiff, high stock was tied with a limp white bow-knot. His standing
collar covered half of either cheek. He wore a jewelled breastpin and a
heavy gold fob-chain and seal. In his too delicate hand, along with the
beaver and his gloves, was a stout, gold-headed cane, and from his coat
skirt his handkerchief painstakingly peeped out behind. All of which
seemed quite natural on him and well related to the highly attractive
attire of the lady beside him.

Yet suddenly Ramsey had a painful misgiving. Hugh was remarking upon
some matter on the other side of the world, when she asked him as
abruptly as a boat might strike a snag: "Is your grandfather a Whig?"

"He is," said Hugh. They laid up their napkins.

"Oh!" sighed Ramsey, but then laughed. "Is your father a Whig, too?"

"Yes, my father, too."

"Not a Henry Clay Whig?" she hopefully prompted.

"Yes, a Henry Clay Whig yet."

Self-consciously she dropped her head over the back of her chair to be
rid of her curls. "My father," she musingly observed, "is a Democrat."

"Yet we can be friends," said Hugh, "can't we?" wondering, when he had
asked, why they need be.

Ramsey did not say. With her chin in her collar she looked herself over
carefully while she brokenly remarked, "All our men folks--four
men--three boys--are--red-hot Democrats."

But on the last word she checked and hearkened, and they smiled together
at the far-away whistle of another steamer, deep-toned, mellowed by
distance, and long sustained.

"That's a Courteney boat," quietly began Hugh, but Ramsey was up and
off.

"_The Empress!_" she called to her mother as she flew.

VIII

QUESTIONS

Out forward of the texas and close beside the great bell, Ramsey halted,
alone in the boundless starlight and rippling breeze on the cabin roof.
The stately _Votaress_, with her towering funnels lost in the upper
night, was running well inshore under a point, wrapped in a world-wide
silence broken only by the placid outgo of her own vast breath, the soft
rush of her torrential footsteps far below, and the answering rustle of
the nearer shore. Even on that side the dark land confessed no outline
save the low tree tops of two or three plantation-house groves, from
each of which shone a lighted window or two, tinier and lonelier than a
glowworm.

Across the point, between its groves, the flood revealed itself at
intervals in pale shimmerings, and just beyond one of