"Upon my word, Mr. Morton, you are worse and worse. When a gentleman dances twice with a young lady on class day, and twice at Mrs. Fanfaron's ball, and joins her in the street besides, has she not a right to feel hurt when he hears with such profound indifference of her coming home after a year's absence?"
Morton could hardly restrain the extremity of his distaste and impatience.
"Miss Leslie, I imagine, would spend very little thought upon the matter." And he hastened, first to change the conversation, and then to close it altogether.
Having escaped from his fair informant, he remained divided between pleasure at the tidings, and annoyance at the manner in which they had been told.
In a few days Miss Leslie arrived. Her beauty had matured during her absence. She was conspicuously and brilliantly handsome, and was admired accordingly,—a fact which, though she could not but be conscious of it, seemed to affect her very little. Morton found her but slightly changed, with the same polished and quiet frankness, the same lively conversation, not without a tinge of sarcasm, and the same enthusiasm of character, betraying itself by an earnestness of manner, and never by any extravagance of expression. He had many opportunities of seeing her, Miss Blanche Blondel being but rarely present, and, in his growing admiration of her, the charms of his unbridled cousin faded more and more from his memory.
CHAPTER X.
| For three whole days you thus may rest From office business, news, and strife.—Pope. |
When the summer heats set in, Meredith, one evening, drove to Morton's house, and, arrayed in linen and grass-cloth, smoked his cigar under his friend's veranda with as much contentment as the thermometer at ninety would permit. The window at his side was that of the room which Morton used as his study, and the table was covered with books.
"Colonel," said Meredith, "what a painstaking fellow you are! Ever since you left college—except when you were off on that journey, which was one of the most rational things you ever did in your life—you have been digging here among your books, as if you were some half-starved law student, with a prospect of matrimony."