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 where the Old Stage Road led on to his father’s farm.

He plodded ardently and earnestly, the consumptive young instructor following his studies with the wistful eyes of one who sees another striving where he has striven and failed.  The students met him with tolerant hilarity, and Tom Bassett, who would have kicked the Declaration of Independence across the campus in lieu of a ball, watched him with secret mirth and open championship.  There had sprung up a strong friendship between the two—­one of those rare affections which bend but do not break.  Dudley Webb, the most brilliant member of his class and the light of his mother’s eyes, began life, as he would end it, with the ready grasp of good-fellowship.  He had long since outgrown his artificial, childish distrust of Nicholas, and he had as long ago forgotten that he had ever entertained it.  As for Nicholas himself, he had not forgotten it, but the memory was of little moment.  He had a work to do in life, and he did it as best he might.  If it were the ploughing of rocky soil, so much the worse; if the uprooting of dead men’s thoughts, so much the better.  He slighted neither the one nor the other.

As he grew older he became tall and broad of chest, with shoulders which suggested the athlete rather than the student.  His hair had darkened to a less flaming red, his eyes had grown brighter, and the freckles had faded into a general gray tone of complexion.

“He will be the ugliest man in the State,” said Mr. Burwell, inflating his pink cheeks, with a return of youthful vanity, “but it is the ugliness that attracts.”

Nicholas had not heard, but, had he done so, the words would have left a sting.  He possessed an inherent regard for physical perfection, rendered the greater by his own tormented childhood.  He was strong and vigorous and of well-knit sinews, but he would have given his muscle for Dudley Webb’s hands and his brains for the other’s hair.

Once, as a half-grown boy, in a fit of jealousy inspired by Dudley’s good looks, he had called him “Miss Nancy,” and knocked him down.  When his enemy had lain at his feet on the green he had raised him up and made amends by standing motionless while Dudley lashed him with a small riding-whip.  The jealousy had vanished since then, but the smart was still there.