Early March, then, saw the deadlock unbroken.  The St. Michael had not been dislodged.  Emma still was unwavering so far as we knew.  We were unable, had we willed, to divest ourselves of our deterrent attributes.  But the situation had changed to this extent that Crocker was said to be on his way down to oversee a new system of spring tillage in person.

Emma took his approach with something between terror and an unwonted resignation.  From the day when he had planted himself firmly beside her fireplace with a boyish wonder at finding himself so much at home, he had represented the incalculable in her carefully planned life.  Declining to accept the attitude of other people toward her, he had almost upset her attitude toward herself.  He was the first man since the scapegrace cousin who had neither feared nor yet provoked her sharp tongue.  While he relished her wit, it had always been with an unspoken deprecation of its cutting edge.  He gave her a queer feeling of having allowances made for her—­a condescension that in anybody but this big, likable boy she would have requited with sarcasm.  But against him the cheveux de frise she successfully presented to the world seemed of no avail.  He knew it was not timber but twigs, and that at worst one was scratched and not impaled.  Day by day she watched the cropping of the long line of flaming willow plumes that escorted her brook toward the level.  The line dwindled as the shorn pollards gave up their withes to bind the vines to the dwarf maples.  She felt the miles between herself and Crocker lessening, and (at rare moments) her scruples ready to be garnered for some sweet and ill-defined but surely serviceable use.  But she would not have been Emma Verplanck if the manner of her not impossible surrender had not troubled her more than the act itself.  Any lack of tact on the part of the husbandman might still spoil things.  She had a whimsical sense that any one of the flaming willows might refuse its contribution to the vineyard should the pruner approach with anything short of a persuasive “con permesso.”

Crocker’s “by your leave” was so far from persuasive that it left her with a panicky desire to run away—­again a new sensation.  He wrote: 

“DEAR EMMA—­

“We have had an endless year to think it over, and the only change on my side is that I need you more than ever.  I will go away for real reasons, for your reasons, but for no others.  If it is only their talk that separates us, their talk has had twelve good months and shall have no more.  I must see you.  May I come tomorrow at the old hour?

“As always yours,

“MORTON CROCKER.”

Something between wrath and dismay was the result of this challenge.  She sat down to answer him according to his impudence, and the words would not come.  The greatness of the required sacrifice came over her and therewith the desire to temporise.  The voice of many Knickerbocker ancestresses spoke in her, and between herself and a real emergency she interposed the impenetrable buckler of a conventionality.  She wrote: