Collins and his intimates had at heart, and they had won Gordon to their side as an enthusiastic supporter of its essential reasonableness. The bill had been killed in committee for the past two years; yet the present year the adverse report had been challenged in the house and had been sustained by a comparatively small majority after strenuous and excited appeals to what was termed the sober, conservative sense of the American people. Gordon's speech in behalf of the measure was listened to with a silence which suggested a desire for enlightenment. After the debate was over there had been prophecies that another year it would stand a good chance of passing. It was toward the close of Gordon's first session in the assembly that the harrowing death of Loretta's child occurred, and, owing to the prominence of the parties concerned in the homicide, which was the first automobile accident in Benham, became town talk. The newspaper artists illustrated the tragedy with drawings of the red devil in the act of striking the victim, portraits of everybody concerned, from Tottie to the apothecary into whose shop she had been carried, and camera cuts of the obsequies. There were appropriate editorials on the iniquity of allowing furious engines to be propelled at a rapid rate through the streets; and sensational conflicting rumors were rife in the news columns as to the amount by which the repentant multi-millionaire had sought to idemnify the mother for his carelessness. Conjecture fixed it at various sums from one thousand to fifty thousand dollars, and one imaginative scribe conjured up the information that Tottie was to be replaced as far as possible by the most beautiful baby which the Howard family could procure by search or advertisement.