St. George hadn’t heard—­he sighed in return—­a habit of his lately:  No, not for two months or more—­not since the letter in which Harry said he had left the ship and had gone up into the interior.  He had, he told her, mentioned the boy’s silence to Kate in a casual way, watching the effect the news produced upon her—­but after the remark that the mails were always irregular from those far-away countries, she had turned the conversation into other channels, she having caught sight of Willits, who had just dismounted from his horse.

As to St. George’s own position in the affair he felt that his hands were still so firmly tied that he could do nothing one way or the other.  His personal intercourse with Willits had been such as he would always have with a man with whom he was on speaking terms, but it never passed that border.  He was courteous, careful of his speech, and mindful of the young man’s devotion to Kate, whose guardian for the time being he was, but he neither encouraged nor thwarted his suit.  Kate was of age and was fully competent to decide for herself—­extremely competent, for that matter.

How little this clear reader of women’s hearts—­and scores had been spread out before him—­knew of Kate’s, no one but the girl herself could have told.  That she was adrift on an open sea without a rudder, and that she had already begun to lose confidence both in her seamanship and in her compass, was becoming more and more apparent to her every day she lived.  All she knew positively was that she had been sailing before the wind for some weeks past with everything flying loose, and that the time had now come for her either to “go about” or keep on her course.

Her suitor’s family she had carefully considered.  She had also studied his environment and the impression he made upon those who had known him longest:—­she must now focus her mental lenses on the man himself.  He had, she knew, graduated with honors, being the valedictorian of his class; had risen rapidly in his profession, and, from what her father said, would soon reach a high place among his brother lawyers.  There was even talk of sending him to the legislature, where her own father, the Honorable Prim, had achieved his title.  She wished, of course, that Mr. Willits’s hair was not quite so red; she wished, too, that the knuckles on his hands were not so large and bony—­and that he was not always at her beck and call; but these, she was forced to admit, were trifles in the make-up of a fine man.  There was, however, a sane mind under the carrot-colored hair and a warm palm inside the knotted knuckles, and that was infinitely more important than little physical peculiarities which one would forget as life went on.  As to his periods of ill health, these she herself could have prevented had she told him the whole truth that night on the stairs, or the day before when she had parried his direct proposal of marriage—­a piece of stupidity for which she never failed to blame herself.