uefully of the girl's mother and wondered if her
intercession would avail aught with the old autocrat. But he had not yet
ventured upon this. There was nothing certain about Mrs. Mivane but her
uncertainty. She never gave a positive opinion. Her attitude of mind was
only to be divined by inference. She never gave a categorical answer.
And indeed he would not have been encouraged to learn that Richard
Mivane himself had already consulted his daughter-in-law, as in this
highhanded evasion of any decision he felt the need of support. For once
the old gentleman was not displeased with her reply, comprehensive,
although glancing aside from the point. Since there were so many young
men in the country, said Mrs. Mivane, she saw no reason for despair!
With this approval of his temporizing policy Richard Mivane left the
matter to the development of the future.

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 s