Glendower was touched: and his nature, as kind as it was proud, immediately smote him for conduct certainly ungracious and perhaps 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 judgment of those averse to its enjoyment,--these never presented an inducement to the stony temperament and dormant heart of Richard Crauford. He looked upon the essences of things internal as the common eye upon outward nature, and loved the many shapes of evil as the latter does the varieties of earth, not for their graces, but their utility. His loves, coarse and low, fed their rank fires from an unmingled and gross depravity. His devotion to wine was either solitary and unseen--for he loved safety better than mirth--or in company with those whose station flattered his vanity, not whose fellowship ripened his crude and nipped affections. Even the recklessness of vice in him had the character of prudence; and in the most rapid and turbulent stream of his excesses, one might detect the rocky and unmoved heart of the calculator at the bottom.