Three days later, he ventured another visit; but his cousin had returned to her home in the country. By this time he was conscious of a great abatement of ardor; and his equanimity was little moved by the disappointment. In a week he had learned to look back on his transient emotion as an effervescence of the moment, and to regard his relative with no slight interest, indeed, yet by no means in a light which could blind him to her glaring faults. He summoned up all that he could recall of herself and her family, and chiefly of her father, whom he remembered in his boyhood as a rough, athletic man, whose black and bushy eyebrows were usually contracted into something which seemed like a frown. These boyish recollections were far from doing Euston justice. He was a man of masculine and determined character. His will was strong, his passions violent; he was full of prejudices, and when thwarted or contradicted, his rage was formidable. His honor was unquestioned; he was most bluntly and unmanageably honest. Yet through the rock and iron of his character, there ran, known to but few, a delicate vein of poetic feeling. The music of his daughter, or the verses of his favorite Burns, could often bring tears to his stern gray eyes. For his wife, whom he had married in a fit of pique and disappointment, when little more than a boy, he cared nothing; but his fondness for his daughter was unbounded. He alone could control her; for she loved him ardently, and he was the only living thing of which she stood in awe. CHAPTER IX. Elle ne manque jamais de saisir promptement L'apparente lueur du moindre attachement, D'en semer la nouvelle avec beaucoup de joie,--_Le Tartufe_. Among Morton's acquaintance was a certain Miss Blanche Blondel. They had been schoolmates when children; and as, at a later date, Miss Blanche had been fond of making long visits to a friend in Cambridge, during term time, Morton, in common with many others, had a college acquaintance with her, so that they were now on a footing of easy intercourse. Not that he liked her. On the contrary, she had inspired him with a very emphatic aversion; but being rather a skirmisher on the outposts of society, than enrolled in the main battalion, she was anxious to make the most of the acquaintance she had. She had the eyes of an Argus, and was as sly, smooth, watchful, and _rusee_ as a tortoise shell cat; wonderfully dexterous at finding or making gossip, and unwearied in sowing it, broadcast, to the right and left.