Interrupting this self-examination the mighty but unwieldy form of Morton Crocker loomed in the white dust crescent, and his premature panama swiftly followed the curve of the low grey wall towards her gate.  As his steps were heard, her mind flew to the forbidding St. Michael on his gold background in her den and she could fairly hear Harwood saying to all of us, “Three to one on the Saint, who takes me?” The jangling of the bell recalled her to Crocker, and she braced herself in the full sunlight to receive him.  For a moment, as he loomed in the archway, she indulged that especial pride which we reserve for that which we might possess but austerely deny ourselves.

Her mingled moods produced an unusual softness.  Crocker felt it and wondered as she gave him her hand and had him sit for a prudent moment outside.  All the hot way up the valley he had had a sense of a crisis.  It was odd to be summoned whither he had been drifting for four years, and now the sight of Emma disarmed, perplexed him.  It seemed ominous.  One finds such transparent kindness in clever people generally at parting, when one would be remembered for one’s self and not for a phrase.  Then Crocker for an instant glimpsed the wilder hope that the softening was for him and not for an occasion.  Emma had never seemed more desirable than to-day.  A white strand or two in her yellow hair, the tiny wrinkles at the corners of her steady grey eyes, and the untimely thinness of her long white fingers made him eager to ward off the advancing years at her side, to keep unchanged, as it were, these precious evidences that she had lived.

Some sense of his tenderness she must have had, for as she chatted gravely about his farming, about the lateness of the almond blossoms, about everything except people, who always tempted her sharp tongue, her manner became almost maternally solicitous.  “To-day you shall have your first tea in my den, Crocker” (so much she presumed on her two years’ seniority), she said at last, “and you are commanded to like my things.”  “What has thy servitor done to deserve this grace?” he managed to reply.  “Nothing,” she said, “graces never are for deserts.  Or, rather, you poor fellow, you have been asked to tramp out here in this glare and really deserve to sit where it is cool.”  As they walked through the hall and the little drawing-room Crocker still felt uneasily that no road with Emma Verplanck could be quite as smooth as it seemed.

The den deserved its name, being a tiny brown room with a single arched window that looked askance at the cypresses and bell towers of Fiesole.  Beside a couch, an Empire desk, and solid shelves of books, the den contained only a couple of chairs and the handful of things that Emma laughingly called her collection.  As Crocker took in vaguely bits of Hispano-Moresque and mellow ivories, a broad medal or so and a well-poised Renaissance bronze, a Japanese painting on the lighted wall, and one or two drawings