“No—­I don’t think the wedding has taken place,” St. George replied vaguely.  “The servants would know if it had—­they know everything—­and Aunt Jemima would be the first to have told me.  The house being lighted up is no evidence.  They have been giving a series of entertainments this winter and there were more to come when I last saw Kate, which was one night at Richard Horn’s.  But let us close that chapter too, my boy.  You and I will take a new lease of life from now on.  You have already put fresh blood into my veins—­I haven’t felt so well for weeks.  Now tell me about yourself.  Your last letter reached me six months ago, if I remember right.  You were then in Rio and were going up into the mountains.  Did you go?”

“Yes—­up into the Rio Abaste country where they had discovered diamonds as big as hens’ eggs—­one had been sold for nearly a quarter of a million dollars—­and everybody was crazy.  I didn’t find any diamonds nor anything else but starvation, so I herded cattle, that being the only thing I knew anything about—­how to ride—­and slept out on the lowlands sometimes under a native mat and sometimes under the kindly stars.  Then we had a revolution and cattle raids, and one night I came pretty near being chewed up by a puma—­and so it went.  I made a little money in rawhides after I got to know the natives, and I’m going back to make some more; and you are going with me when we get things straightened out.  I wouldn’t have come home except that I heard you had been turned out neck and crop from Kennedy Square.  One of Mr. Seymour’s clerks stopped in Rio on his way to the River Plate and did some business with an English agent whom I met afterward at a hacienda, and who told me about you when he learned I was from Kennedy Square.  And when I think of it all, Uncle George, and what you have suffered on account of me!”—­Here his voice faltered.  “No!—­I won’t talk about it—­I can’t.  I have spent too many sleepless nights over it:  I have been hungry and half dead, but I have kept on—­and I am not through:  I’ll pull out yet and put you on your feet once more if I live!”

St. George laid his hand tenderly on the young man’s wrist.  He knew how the boy felt about it.  That was one of the things he loved him for.

“And so you started home when you heard it,” he went on, clearing his throat.  “That was just like you, you dear fellow!  And you haven’t come home an hour too soon.  I should have been measured for a pine coffin in another week.”  The choke was quite in evidence now.  “You see, I really couldn’t go to Coston’s when I thought it all over.  I had made up my mind to go for a week or so until I saw this place, and then I determined I would stop with Jemima.  I could eke out an existence here on what I had left and still feel like a gentleman, but I couldn’t settle down on dear Peggy Coston and be anything but a poltroon.  As to my making a living at the law—­that was pure moonshine.  I haven’t opened a