WHEN Helen Lowell reached Boston from her visit with Sallie Worth, she found her father in the midst of his political campaign. The Hon. Everett Lowell was the representative of Congress from the Boston Highlands district. His home was an old fashioned white Colonial house built during the American Revolution.

He was not a man of great wealth, but well-to-do, a successful politician, enthusiastic student, a graduate of Harvard, and he had always made a specialty of championing the cause of the “freedmen.” He was a chronic proposer of a military force bill for the South.

His family was one of the proudest in America. He had a family tree five hundred years old—an unbroken line of unconquerable men who held liberty dearer than life. He believed in the heritage of good honest blood as he believed in blooded horses. His home was furnished in perfect taste, with beautiful old rosewood and mahogany stuff that had both character and history. On the walls hung the stately portraits of his ancestors representative of three hundred years of American life. He never confused his political theories about the abstract rights of the African with his personal choice of associates or his pride in his Anglo-Saxon blood. With him politics was one thing, society another.

His pet hobby, which combined in one his philanthropic ideals and his practical politics, was of late a patronage he had extended to young George Harris, the bright mulatto son of Eliza and George Harris whose dramatic slave history had made their son famous at Harvard.

This young negro was a speaker of fair ability and was accompanying Lowell on his campaign tours of the district, making speeches for his patron, who had obtained for him a clerk’s position in the United States Custom House. Harris was quite a drawing card at these meetings. He had a natural aptitude for politics; modest, affable, handsome, and almost white, he was a fine argument in himself to support Lowell’s political theories, who used him for all he was worth as he had at the previous election.

Harris had become a familiar figure at Lowell’s home in the spacious library, where he had the free use of the books, and frequently he dined with the family, when there at dinner time hard at work on some political speech or some study for a piece of music.

Lowell had met his daughter at the depot behind his pair of Kentucky thoroughbreds. This daughter, his only child, was his pride and joy. She was a blonde beauty, and her resemblance to her father was remarkable. He was a widower, and this lovely girl, at once the incarnation of his lost love and so fair a reflection of his being, had ruled him with absolute sway during the past few years.

He was laughing like a boy at her coming.

“Oh! my beauty, the sight of your face gives me new life!” he cried smiling with love and admiration.

“You mustn’t try to spoil me!” she laughed.

“Did you really have a good time in Dixie?” he whispered.

“Oh! Papa, such a time!” she exclaimed shutting her eyes as though she were trying to live it over again.

“Really?”

“Beaux, morning, noon and night,—dancing, moonlight rides, boats gliding along the beautiful river and mocking birds singing softly their love-song under the window all night!”

“Well you did have romance,” he declared.

“Yes,” she went on “and such people, such hospitality—oh! I feel as though I never had lived before.”

“My dear, you mustn’t desert us all like that,” he protested.

“I can’t help it, I’m a rebel now.”

“Then keep still till the campaign’s over!” he warned in mock fear.

“And the boys down there,” she continued, “they are such boys! Time doesn’t seem to be an object with them at all. Evidently they have never heard of our uplifting Yankee motto ‘Time is money.’ And such knightly deference! such charming old fashioned chivalrous ways!”

“But, dear, isn’t that a little out of date?”

“How staid and proper and busy Boston seems! I know I am going to be depressed by it.”

“I know what’s the matter with you!” he whistled.

“What?” she slyly asked.

“One of those boys.”

“I confess. Papa, he’s as handsome as a prince.”

“What does he look like?”

“He is tall, dark, with black hair, black eyes, slender, graceful, all fire and energy.”

“What’s his name?”

“St. Clare—Robert St. Clare. His father was away from home. He’s a politician, I think.”

“You don’t say! St. Clare. Well of all the jokes! His father is my Democratic chum in the House—an old fire-eating Bourbon, but a capital fellow.”

“Did you ever see him?”

“No, but I’ve had good times with his father. He used to own a hundred slaves. He’s a royal fellow, and pretty well fixed in life for a Southern politician. I don’t think though I ever saw his boy. Anything really serious?”

“He hasn’t said a word—but he’s coming to see me next week.”

“Well things are moving, I must say!”