ungrateful. He held out his hand to Crauford; with the most
respectful warmth that personage seized and pressed it: and from that
time Crauford's visits appeared to receive a license which, if not
perfectly welcome, was at least never again questioned.

"I shall have this man now," muttered Crauford, between his ground
teeth, as he left the house, and took his way to his counting-house.
There, cool, bland, fawning, and weaving in his close and dark mind
various speculations of guilt and craft, he sat among his bills and
gold, like the very gnome and personification of that Mammon of gain
to which he was the most supple though concealed adherent.

Richard Crauford was of a new but not unimportant family. His father
had entered into commerce, and left a flourishing firm and a name of
great respectability in his profession to his son. That son was a man
whom many and opposite qualities rendered a character of very singular
and uncommon stamp. Fond of the laborious acquisition of money, he
was equally attached to the ostentatious pageantries of expense.
Profoundly skilled in the calculating business of his profession, he
was devoted equally to the luxuries of pleasure; but the pleasure was
suited well to the mind which pursued it. The divine intoxication of
that love where the delicacies and purities of affection consecrate
the humanity of passion was to him a thing of which not even his
youngest imagination had ever dreamed. The social concomitants of the
wine-cup (which have for the lenient an excuse, for the austere a
temptation), the generous expanding of the heart, the increased
yearning to kindly affection, the lavish spirit throwing off its
exuberance in the thousand lights and emanations of wit,--these, which
have rendered the molten grape, despite of its excesses, not unworthy
of the praises of immortal hymns, and taken harshness from the