qually in need of it would have done. He did not lose his head. He
showed no pride in it. Green River, soon seeing this, rewarded him in
various ways, each significant in its own fashion. Nondescript groups
round the stove in his uncle's little store ceased to look for signs
that he felt superior to them, and welcomed him as before, restoring to
him his privilege of listening to talk that was more important than it
seemed, public sentiment uncoloured and without reserve, the real voice
of the town. Mrs. Saxon, of the old aristocracy of the town, with
inborn social prejudices stronger than any acquired from the Everards,
broke all her rules and invited him to Sunday-night supper.

"The boy's not spoiled," his old friend Luther Ward said to the Judge
approvingly. "He knows his place."

"That's the surest way to climb out of it," said Judge Saxon, advisedly,
for it was the Judge who had the closest and most discerning eyes upon
Neil Donovan's career. Listlessly at first, because he had looked on at
too many uphill and losing fights against the world, but later with
interest, forced from him almost against his will, he watched it grow.

To a casual observer the boy would have seemed to be fitting himself not
for an ornament to the legal profession, but for the office boy Colonel
Everard had called him, but he would have seemed a willing office boy.
He spent hours uncomplainingly looking up obscure points of law for some
purpose nobody explained to him. He devoted long, sunny afternoons to
looking up titles connected with some mortgage loan which nobody gave
him the details of, and he seemed satisfied with his occupation, and
equally satisfied to devote a morning to plodding through new-fallen
snow delivering invitations to some party of Mrs. Saxon's.

When he was actually studying, he lost himself in the Judge's
out-of-date reference books, as if they contained some secret as vital
as the elixir of youth, and might yield it at any moment. Mr. Burr, at
first ridiculing pupil and course of instruction alike, and with some
show of reason, began shamefacedly and afterward openly to give him what
benefit he could from the more modern education which had been wasted
upon him. Between his two teachers the boy arrived at conclusions of his
own. Neil was studying law by the old method which evolved so many
different men of letters and keen-witted lawyers, a method obsolete as
the Judge's clothes, but Neil gave allegiance to it ard