“I’ll sort them, ma,” he said lightly.  “There’s not a speck in the lot of them too fine for my eyes.”  And he knelt down beside the earthy heap.

But when he went up to his room an hour later and lighted his kerosene lamp, it was not of his stepmother that he was thinking—­nor was it of Eugenia.  His stiffened muscles contracted in physical pain, and his brain was deadened by the sense of unutterable defeat.  The delirium of his anger had passed away; the fever of his skin had chilled beneath the cold sweat that broke over him—­in the reaction from the madness that had gripped him he was conscious of a sanity almost sublime.  The habitual balance of his nature had swung back into place.

He got out his books and arranged them as usual beside the lamp.  Then he took up the volume he had been reading and held it unopened in his hands.  He stared straight before him at the whitewashed wall of the little room, at the rough pine bedstead, at the crude washstand, at the coloured calendar above.

On the unearthly whiteness of the wall he beheld the pictured vision of that other student of his race—­the kinsman who had lived toiling and had died learning.  He came to him a tragic figure in mire-clotted garments—­a youth with aspiring eyes and muck-stained feet.  He wondered what had been his history—­that unknown labourer who had sought knowledge—­that philosopher of the plough who had died in ignorance.

“Poor fools!” he said bitterly, “poor fools!” for in his vision that other student walked not alone.

The next morning he went into Kingsborough at his usual hour, and, passing his own small office, kept on to where Tom Bassett’s name was hung.

It was county court day, and the sheriff and the clerk of the court were sitting peaceably in armchairs on the little porch of the court-house.  As Nicholas passed with a greeting, they turned from a languid discussion of the points of a brindle cow in the street to follow mentally his powerful figure.

“I reckon he’s got more muscle than any man in town,” remarked the sheriff in a reflective drawl.  “Unless Phil Bates, the butcher, could knock him out.  Like to see ’em at each other, wouldn’t you?” he added with a laugh.

The clerk carefully tilted his chair back against the wall and surveyed his outstretched feet.  “Like to live to see him stumping this State for Congress,” he replied.  “There goes the brainiest man these parts have produced since before the war—­the people want their own men, and it’s time they had ’em.”

Nicholas passed on to Tom’s office, and, finding it empty, turned back to the judge’s house, where he found father and son breakfasting opposite each other at a table bright with silver and chrysanthemums.

They hospitably implored him to join them, but he shook his head, motioning away the plate which old Caesar would have laid before him.

“I wanted to ask Tom if he had heard this—­this lie about me,” he said quickly.