Yes--a very gallant and handsome young man was our prince as he handed Kate up the stairs on her way to the dressing-room, and looked it in his pearl-gray coat with buttons of silver, fluffy white silk scarf, high dog-eared collar, ivory-white waistcoat, and tight-fitting trousers of nankeen yellow, held close to the pumps with invisible straps. And a very gallant and handsome young fellow he felt himself to be on this night of his triumph, and so thought Kate--in fact she had fallen in love with him over again--and so too did every one of the young girls who crowded about them, as well as the dominating, erect aristocrat of a father, and the anxious gentle mother, who worshipped the ground on which he walked. Kate had noted every expression that crossed his face, absorbing him in one comprehensive glance as he stood in the full blaze of the candles, her gaze lingering on his mouth and laughing eyes and the soft sheen of his brown hair, its curved-in ends brushing the high velvet collar of his coat--and so on down his shapely body to his shapely feet. Never had she seen him so adorable--and he was all her own, and for life! 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.