He acted with his usual simplicity.  To Emma he wrote a brief note upbraiding her for fearing the voices of the valley, professing his eagerness to return when the St. Michael had been put out of the reckoning, and declaring that if it were not soon, he would willy-nilly come back and see how things were between them.  It was a letter that wounded Emma, yet somehow warmed her, too, and from its reception we found her in an unwonted attitude of nonconformity to the verdicts of the valley.  She began to speak up in behalf of this or that human specimen under our diminishing lenses with the unsubtle and disconcerting bluntness of Morton Crocker himself.  The phenomenon kept alive our waning interest during nearly a year of waiting.  As for Crocker he gave it out ostentatiously that he was bound for a wonderful Cima in Northumbria and afterward was to try dry-fly fishing on the Itchen.  Beyond that he had no plans.  All this was characteristically the truth; he bought the Cima, wrote of his baskets to Harwood, but stayed away past his melons, his grapes and his olives.  By early winter we heard of him shooting the moose in New Brunswick, and later planning a system of art education in the Massachusetts schools, and it was not till the brisk days of March that we learned the west wind was bringing him our way again.

Meanwhile Emma had acquired a few more grey hairs and had resolutely declined to dispossess herself of the St. Michael.  A couple of months after Crocker’s leave-taking, a note had come to her from Crespi, the unfrocked priest and consummate antiquarian, who, to the point of improvising a chef d’oeuvre, will furnish anything that this gilded age demands.  Crespi most respectfully begged to represent an urgent client, a Russian prince, who desired a fine Crivelli.  Would the most gentle Miss Verplanck haply part with hers?  The price should be what she chose to name.  It was no question of money, but of obliging a client whom Crespi could ill afford to disappoint.  Emma curtly declined the offer.  The St. Michael was valued for personal reasons and was not for sale.  Six weeks later came a more insidious suggestion.  The Director of the Uffizi, learning that she possessed a masterpiece of a school sparsely represented in the first Italian gallery, pleading that such an object should not pass from Italy, and representing a number of generous art-lovers who desired to add it to the collections under his care, made the following offer, trusting, however, not to any pecuniary inducement but to her loyalty as an honorary citizen of Florence.  The price named was something less than the London value, but its acceptance would have perpetually endowed the victoria, and perhaps—.  If the malicious Harwood had not passed the word that the offer was a ruse of the wily Crocker, we all believed that she would have accepted.  Indeed, we regretted her obduracy.  It would have been such a capital way out, with no sacrifice of her scruples nor waiver of our collective impressiveness.  So Harwood came in for mild reprehension, the Sage Dennis remarking with some asperity that when the gods have provided us with farces, comedies, and tragedies in from one to five acts it is unseemly to string them out to six or seven.