e 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.

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 pl