Then one fine morning, to the astonishment of every one, and greatly to Todd’s disgust, no less a person than Mr. Langdon Willits of “Oak Hill” (distant three miles away) dismounted at Coston’s front porch, and throwing the reins to the waiting darky, stretched his convalescent, but still shaky, legs in the direction of the living-room, there to await the arrival of “Miss Seymour of Kennedy Square,” who, so he informed Todd, “expected him.”

Todd scraped a foot respectfully in answer, touched his cocoanut of a head with his monkey claw of a finger, waited until the broad back of the red-headed gentleman had been swallowed up by the open door, and then indulged in this soliloquy: 

“Funny de way dem bullets hab o’ missin’ folks.  Des a leetle furder down an’ dere wouldn’t ‘a’ been none o’ dis yere foolishness.  Pity Marse Harry hadn’t practised some mo’.  Ef he had ter do it ag’in I reckon he’d pink him so he neber be cavortin’ ‘roun’ like he is now.”

Willits’s sudden appearance filled St. George with ill-concealed anxiety.  He did not believe in this parade of invalidism, nor did he like Kate’s encouraging smile when she met him—­and there was no question that she did smile—­and, more portentous still, that she enjoyed it.  Other things, too, she grew to enjoy, especially the long rides in the woods and over to the broad water.  For Willits’s health after a few days of the sunshine of Kate’s companionship had undergone so renovating a process that the sorrel horse now arrived at the porch almost every 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