day, whereupon Kate's Joan would be led out, and the
smiled-upon gentleman in English riding-boots and brown velvet jacket
and our gracious lady in Lincoln green habit with wide hat and sweeping
plume would mount their steeds and be lost among the pines.

Indeed, to be exact, half of Kate's time was now spent in the saddle,
Willits riding beside her. And with each day's outing a new and, to St.
George, a more disturbing intimacy appeared to be growing between them.
Now it was Willits's sister who had to be considered and especially
invited to Wesley--a thin wisp of a woman with tortoise-shell sidecombs
and bunches of dry curls, who always dressed in shiny black silk and
whose only ornament was her mother's hair set in a breastpin; or it was
his father by whom she must sit when he came over in his gig--a bluff,
hearty man who generally wore a red waistcoat with big bone buttons and
high boots with tassels in front.

This last confidential relation, when the manners and bearing of
the elder man came under his notice, seemed to St. George the most
unaccountable of all. Departures from the established code always jarred
upon him, and the gentleman in the red waistcoat and tasselled boots
often wandered so far afield that he invariably set St. George's teeth
on edge. Although he had never met Kate before, he called her by her
first name after the first ten minutes of their acquaintance--his son,
he explained, having done nothing but sound her praises for the past
two years, an excuse which carried no weight in gentleman George's mind
because of its additional familiarity. He had never dared, he knew, to
extend that familiarity to Peggy--it had always been "Mrs. Coston" to
her and it had always been "Mr. Coston" to Tom, and it was now "your
Honor" or "judge" to the dispenser of justice. For though the owner
of Oak Hill lived within a few miles of the tumble-down remnant that
sheltered the Costons; and though he had fifty servants to their one, or
half a one--and broad acres in proportion, to say nothing of flocks and
herds--St. George had always been aware that he seldom crossed their
porch steps or they his. That little affair of some fifty or more years
ago was still remembered, and the children of people who did that sort
of thing must, of course, pay the penalty. Even Peggy never failed to
draw the line. "Very nice people, my dear," he had heard her say to Kate
one day when the subject of the younger man's family had come