one.

It runs not alone through the man family, but every other animal as
well, from the broken-hearted bird which sits on the nearby limb, and
sees the wreck of her home by the ravages of a night-prowling
marauder, to the squalidest of human beings, turning their backs
forever on the mud-hut that had once sheltered them.

To Mrs. Westmore it was a keen grief. Here had she come as a
bride--here had she lived since--here had been born her two
children--here occurred the great sorrow of her life.

And the sacredest memory, at last, of life, lies not in the
handclasp of a coming joy, but in the footfall of a vanishing sorrow.

Westmoreland meant everything to Mrs. Westmore--the pride of birth,
of social standing, the ties of motherhood, the very altar of her
life. And it was her husband's name and her own family. It meant she
was not of common clay, nor unknown, nor without influence. It was
bound around and woven into her life, and part of her very existence.

Home in the South means more than it does anywhere else on earth; for
local self-government--wherever the principle came from--finds its
very altar there. States-right is nothing but the home idea,
stretched over the state and bounded by certain lines. The peculiar
institutions of the South made every home a castle, a town, a
government, a kingdom in itself, in which the real ruler is a queen.

Ask the first negro or child met in the road, whose home is this, or
that, and one would think the entire Southland was widowed.

From the day she had entered it as a bride, Westmoreland, throughout
the County, had been known as the home of Mrs. Westmore.

She was proud of it. She loved it with that love which had come down
through a long line of cavaliers loving their castles.

And now she knew it must go, as well as that, sooner or later, Death
itself must come.

She knew Richard Travis, and she knew that, if from his life were
snatched the chance of making Alice Westmore his wife he would sell
the place as cold-bloodedly as Shipton would.

Travis sat smoking, but reading her. He spelled her thoughts as
easily as if they had been written on her forehead, for he was a man
who spelled. He smoked calmly and indifferently, but the one question
of his heart--the winning of Alice,--surged in his breast and it
said: "Now is the time--now--buy her--the mother. This is the one
thing which is her price."

He looked at Mrs. Westmore again. He scanned her closely, from he