steady grey eyes, and the untimely thinness of her
long white fingers made him eager to ward off the advancing years at her
side, to keep unchanged, as it were, these precious evidences that she
had lived.

Some sense of his tenderness she must have had, for as she chatted
gravely about his farming, about the lateness of the almond blossoms,
about everything except people, who always tempted her sharp tongue, her
manner became almost maternally solicitous. "To-day you shall have your
first tea in my den, Crocker" (so much she presumed on her two years'
seniority), she said at last, "and you are commanded to like my things."
"What has thy servitor done to deserve this grace?" he managed to reply.
"Nothing," she said, "graces never are for deserts. Or, rather, you poor
fellow, you have been asked to tramp out here in this glare and really
deserve to sit where it is cool." As they walked through the hall and the
little drawing-room Crocker still felt uneasily that no road with Emma
Verplanck could be quite as smooth as it seemed.

The den deserved its name, being a tiny brown room with a single arched
window that looked askance at the cypresses and bell towers of Fiesole.
Beside a couch, an Empire desk, and solid shelves of books, the den
contained only a couple of chairs and the handful of things that Emma
laughingly called her collection. As Crocker took in vaguely bits of
Hispano-Moresque and mellow ivories, a broad medal or so and a
well-poised Renaissance bronze, a Japanese painting on the lighted wall,
and one or two drawings by great contemporaries, Emma's friends, he was
amazed at the quality of everything. A sense of extreme fastidiousness
rebuked, in a way, his more indiscriminate zeal as a collector.
Uncomfortably near him on the dark wall he began to be aware of something
marvellous on old gold when tea interrupted his observations. Tea with
Emma was always engrossing. The mere practice and etiquette of it brought
the gentlewoman in her into a lovely salience. Her hands and eyes became
magical, her talk light and constant without insistency. A symbolist
might imagine eternal correspondence between the amber brew and her sunny
hair. It was easy to adore Emma at tea, and generally she did not resent
a discreetly pronounced homage. But this afternoon she grew almost
petulant with Crocker as they talked at random, and finally laughed out
impatiently: "I really can't bear your ignoring my St Michael, especially
as