As for our dear St. George Temple, who had never taken his eyes off them, he thought they were the goodliest pair the stars ever shone upon, and this his happiest night.  There would be no more stumbling after this.  Kate had the bridle well in hand now; all she needed was a clear road, and that was ahead of both horse and rider.

“Makes your blood jump in your veins, just to look at them, doesn’t it, Talbot?” cried St. George to Harry’s father when Kate disappeared—­laying his hand as he spoke on the shoulder of the man with whom he had grown up from a boy.  “Is there anything so good as the love of a good woman?—­the wise old prophet places her beyond the price of rubies.”

“Only one thing, St. George—­the love of a good man—­one like yourself, you dear old fellow.  And why the devil you haven’t found that out years ago is more than I can understand.  Here you are my age, and you might have had a Kate and Harry of your own by this time, and yet you live a stupid old—­”

“No, I won’t hear you talk so, colonel!” cried a bride of a year.  “Uncle George is never stupid, and he couldn’t be old.  What would all these young girls do—­what would I have done” (another love affair with St. George as healer and mender!)—­“what would anybody have done without him?  Come, Miss Lavinia—­do you hear the colonel abusing Uncle George because he isn’t married?  Speak up for him—­it’s wicked of you, colonel, to talk so.”

Miss Lavinia Clendenning, who was one of St. George’s very own, in spite of her forty-odd years, threw back her head until the feathers in her slightly gray hair shook defiantly: 

“No—­I won’t say a word for him, Sue.  I’ve given him up forever.  He’s a disgrace to everybody who knows him.”

“Oh, you renegade!” exclaimed St. George in mock alarm.

“Yes,—­a positive disgrace!  He’ll never marry anybody, Sue, until he marries me.  I’ve begged him on my knees until I’m tired, to name the day, and he won’t!  Just like all you shiftless Marylanders, sir—­never know when to make up your minds.”

“But you threw me over, Lavinia, and broke my heart,” laughed Temple with a low bow, his palms flattened against his waistcoat in assumed humility.

“When?”

“Oh, twenty years ago.”

“Oh, my goodness gracious!  Of course I threw you over then;—­you were just a baby in arms and I was old enough to be your mother—­but now it’s different.  I’m dying to get married and nobody wants me.  If you were a Virginian instead of a doubting Marylander, you would have asked me a hundred times and kept on asking until I gave in.  Now it’s too late.  I always intended to give in, but you were so stupid you couldn’t or wouldn’t understand.”

“It’s never too late to mend, Lavinia,” he prayed with hands extended.

“It’s too late to mend you, St. George!  You are cracked all over, and as for me—­I’m ready to fall to pieces any minute.  I’m all tied up now with corset laces and stays and goodness knows what else.  No—­I’m done with you.”