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, Cæsar, 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. Cæsar had many arts at command touching the burnishing of
buckles and buttons, and even in clear-starching steinkirks and the