Page:Watch and Ward (Boston, Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1878).djvu/66

Rh of day, she should cultivate them. But Nora was interested in Mr. Fenton; the dormant pulse of kinship had been quickened; it began to throb with delicious power. This was enough for Roger. "I don't know," he said, "whether he 's an honest man or a scamp, but at a venture I suppose I must invite him down." To this Nora replied that she thought his letter was "so beautiful"; and Mr. Fenton received a fairly civil summons.

Whether or no he was an honest man remained to be seen; but on the face of the matter he appeared no scamp. He was, in fact, a person difficult to classify. Roger had made up his mind that he would be outrageously rough and Western; full of strange oaths and bearded, for aught he knew, like the pard. In aspect, however, Fenton was a pretty fellow enough, and his speech, if not especially conciliatory to ears polite, possessed a certain homely vigor in which ears polite might have found their account. He was as little as possible, certainly, of Roger's circle; but he carried about him the native fragrance of another circle, beside which the social perfume familiar to Roger's nostrils might have seemed a trifle stale and insipid. He was invested with a loose-fitting cosmopolitan Occidentalism, which seemed to say to Roger that, of the two, he was the provincial. Considering his years,—they numbered but twenty-five,—Fenton's tough maturity was very wonderful. You would have confessed, however, that he had a true genius for his part, and that it became him better to play at manhood than at juvenility. He could never have been a ruddy-cheeked boy. He was tall and lean, with a keen dark eye, a smile humorous, but not exactly genial, a thin,