“I am glad to see you, Nicholas,” she said.  “Juliet was asking after you in her last letter.  You were always a favourite of Juliet’s.  I was telling Mr. Burwell so only last night.”

“She was very kind,” returned Nicholas, and added:  “Is Miss Juliet—­Mrs. Galt well?”

Juliet Burwell had married five years before, and he had not seen her since.

Mrs. Burwell nodded cheerily.  She was still fresh and youthful, her pink cheeks and bright eyes giving the gray of her hair the effect of powder sprinkled on her brown fringe.

“Yes, Juliet is well,” she answered.  “They are living in Richmond now.  Mr. Galt had to give up his practice in New York because the climate did not suit Juliet’s health.  I told him she couldn’t stand transplanting to the north, and I was right.  They had to move south again.  Yes, Mr. Pollard, the middle-size irons, please.  I think they’ll fit my stove.  If they don’t, I’ll exchange them for the small ones.  What did you say, Nicholas?  Oh! good-morning.”

She turned away, and Nicholas stepped over her dripping umbrella and went out into the rain.

When he was once outside he shook the water from his shoulders and walked rapidly in the direction of the old brick court-house, isolated upon the larger green.  The door and windows were closed, but he ascended the stone steps and stood beneath the portico, looking back upon the way that he had come.

The street was deserted, save for a solitary ox-cart rolling heavily through the mud.  In the distance the gray drops made a sombre veil, through which the foliage of King’s College showed in a blurred discolouration.  From the branches of trees a double fall of water descended with a melancholy sound.

Presently the ox-cart neared him, and the driver nodded, eyeing him with apathetic interest.

When the cart had passed Nicholas came down the steps and started up the street at the same rapid walk.  He was not thinking of his way, but the impulse of action had seized upon him, and he was walking down the ferment in his brain.  He did not formulate the thought that with bodily fatigue would come mental indifference; he merely felt that when he was tired—­dead tired—­he would go home and sit down to dinner and face his father and discuss Jerry Pollard’s terms.  He would do that when he was too tired to care—­not before.

When he reached the heavy iron gate of the college he swung it open and entered the grounds.  In the centre of the walk stood the statue of a great Colonial governor, and he paused before it for an instant, staring up into the battered features of the marble face.  He realised suddenly that he had never looked at it before.  Daily, for twelve years, he had passed the college campus, sometimes crossing it so that he might have brushed the effigy of the great Englishman with a careless hand—­but he had never seen the face before.  Then he looked through the falling rain at the deserted archway of