wide experience, to
settle all social barriers."

The judge agreed as before.

"I am glad to say that my wife takes my view of it," the other went on.
"Indeed, I think she has expressed what I have said to Mrs. Webb."

"Your wife is an honour to her sex," said the judge, bowing.

Then Mr. Burwell left, and the judge spent another half-hour walking up
and down his study floor. He had gained the victory, but he would have
felt pleasanter had it been defeat. It was as if he had taken some
secret advantage of a woman--of a widow.

But the future of Amos Burr's son was sealed so far as it lay in the
judge's power to settle with circumstances, and each morning during the
school term Mrs. Webb frowned down upon his hurrying figure as it sped
along the street and turned the corner at the palace green. Sometimes,
when snow was falling, he would shoot by like an arrow, and Dudley would
say with quick compassion, as he looked up from his steaming cakes:
"It's because he hasn't any overcoat, mother. He runs to keep warm."

But Mrs. Webb's placid eyes would not darken.

When the boys grew too old for school Tom and Dudley went to King's
College for a couple of years, while Nicholas returned to the farm. The
judge still befriended him, and the contents of Tom's class books found
their way into his head sooner or later, with more information than
Tom's brain could hold. One of the instructors at the college--a
consumptive young fellow, whose ambitions had leaned towards the
bar--gave the boy what assistance he needed, and when the work of the
class-room and the farm was over, the two would meet in the dim old
library of the college and plod through heavy, discoloured pages, while
the portraits of painted aristocrats glowered down upon the intrusive
plebeian.

Despite the hard labour of spring ploughing and the cold of early winter
dawns, when he was up and out of doors, the years passed happily enough.
He beheld the future through the visions of an imaginative mind, and it
seemed big with promise. Sitting in the quaint old library, surrounded
by faded relics and colourless traditions, he felt the breath of hushed
oratory in the air, and political passion stirred in the surrounding
dust. There was a niche in a small alcove, where he spent the spare
hours of many a day, the words of great, long-gone Virginians lying
before him; behind him, through the small square window, all the
blue-green sweep of the college grounds ending w