The general brightened.

“’Tisn’t nature,” he declared.  “You can’t expect a woman to go against nature, sir.”

“And Mrs. Webb, though an unusual woman (the general nodded), is still a woman.”

The general nodded again, though less emphatically.

“On my soul, she’s wonderful!” he exclaimed.  “Why, damme, sir, if I had that woman to brace me up I shouldn’t need a julep.”

And the judge, flinching from his friend’s profanity, called Caesar to bring in the decanters.

Some time later the general left and Mr. Burwell appeared, to be met and dispatched by the same arguments.

“Naturally my instincts prompt me to side with an unprotected widow,” said Mr. Burwell.

“No Virginian could feel otherwise,” admitted the judge in the slightly pompous tone in which he alluded to his native State.

“But as I said to my wife,” continued Mr. Burwell with convincing earnestness, “these matters had best be left to men.  There is no need for our wives and daughters to be troubled by them.  It is for us, who are acquainted with the world and who have had 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.