Emsden’s depression would have been more serious had he not fortunately sundry tokens of the old man’s favor to cherish in his memory, which seemed to intimate that this elusiveness was only a shrewd scheme to delay and thwart him rather than a positive and reasonable disposition to deny his suit.  In short, Emsden began to realize that instead of a damsel of eighteen he had to court a coquette rising sixty, of the sterner sex, and deafer than an adder when he chose.  His artful quirks were destined to try the young lover’s diplomacy to the utmost, and Emsden appreciated this, but he reassured himself with the reflection that it was better thus than if it were the girl who vacillated and delighted to torture him with all the arts of a first-class jilt.  He was constantly in and out of the house almost as familiarly as if he were already betrothed, for in the troublous period that seemed now closing, with its sudden flights, its panics, its desperate conflicts with the Indians, he had been able to give an almost filial aid to Richard Mivane in the stead of the son whom the old man had lost.

Richard Mivane had always felt himself an alien, a sojourner in this new land, and perchance he might not have been able even partially to reconcile himself to the ruder conditions of his later life if the bursting of a financial bubble had not swept away all hope of returning to the status of his earlier home in England when the tragedy of the duel had been sunk in oblivion.  The frontier was a fine place to hide one’s poverty and fading graces, he had once remarked, and thereafter had seemed to resign himself to its hardships,—­indeed, sometimes he consigned his negro body-servant, Caesar, to other duties than his exclusive attendance.  He had even been known to breakfast with his head tied up in a handkerchief when some domestic crisis had supervened, such as the escape of all the horses from the pinfold, to call away his barber.  As this functionary was of an active temperament and not at all averse to the labor in the fields, he proved of more value thus utilized than in merely furnishing covert amusement to the stationers by his pompous duplication of his master’s attitude of being too cultured, traveled, and polished for his surroundings.  He was a trained valet, however, expert in all the details of dressing hair, powdering, curling, pomatuming, and other intricacies of the toilet of a man of fashion of that day.  Caesar had many arts at command touching the burnishing of buckles and buttons, and even in clear-starching steinkirks and the cambric ruffles of shirts.  As he ploughed he was wont to tell of his wonderful experiences while in his master’s service in London (although he had never crossed the seas); and these being accepted with seeming seriousness, he carried his travels a step farther and described the life he remembered in the interior of Guinea (although he had never seen the shores of Africa).  This life so closely resembled