Nicholas finished his breakfast, and a little later walked in to town.  He was in exuberant spirits, and his thoughts were high on the scaffolding where his future was building.  Success and Eugenia startled, allured, delighted him.  He was at the age of sublime self-confidence, but his eyes were not bandaged by it.  He knew that without success—­such success as he dreamed of—­there could be, for him, no Eugenia.  He believed in her as he believed in the sun, and yet he was not sure of her—­he could not be until he possessed her and she bore his name.  That she might not love him he admitted; that she might even love another he saw to be dimly possible; but he was determined that so long as no other man held her his arms should be open.  In the first ardour of his mood his relative position to that society of which she formed a part was lost sight of, if not obscured.  Now he realised bitterly that he might work for a lifetime in the class in which he was born, and at the end still find Eugenia far from him.  He must rise above his work and his people, he must cut his old name anew, he must walk rough-shod where his mind led him—­among men who were his superiors only in the accident of a better birthright.  And if on that higher plane his ambitions did not betray, he would bring honour to his State and to Eugenia.

Here the two loves of the boy and the man stood out boldly.  The old romantic fervour with which he had longed for the days of Marshall and Madison, of Jefferson and Henry, still lingered on as an exotic patriotism in an era of time-servers and unprofitable servants.  There was an old-fashioned democracy about him—­a pioneer simplicity—­as one who had walked from the great days of Virginia into her lesser ones.  A century ago he might have left his plough to fight, and, having fought, might have returned thereto; but the battle would have tingled in his blood and the furrows have gone crooked.  He would have ploughed, not for love of the plough, but because the time for the sowing of the grain had come.

Now he walked rapidly to his work, seeing Eugenia in the woods, in the sunshine, in the very clouds lifted high above.  The thought of her surrounded him as an atmosphere.

As for the girl, she rode home and spent the long day in the garden potting plants for the winter.  When she came into the hall in the early afternoon, with her trowel in her hand and her sleeves rolled back from her white arms, her father called her to the porch, and, going out, she found Dudley Webb in one of the cane chairs.  He sprang to his feet as she reached the threshold, and held out his hand, but she laughed and showed the earth that clung to her wrists.  “Unclean! unclean!” she cried gaily.  Her face had flushed from its warm pallor and her hair hung low upon her forehead.  A long streak of clay lay across her skirt where she had knelt in the flower-bed.

He seized her protesting hand, admiration lighting his eyes.  “Why, little Eugie is a woman!” he exclaimed.  “Can you grasp it, General?”