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 the old brick building. For the first time
those grim walls, which had been thrice overthrown and had arisen thrice
from their ashes, impressed him with the triumphant service they had
rendered in the culture of his kind. He saw it as it was--a sacred
skeleton, an honourable decay. The long line of illustrious hands that
had procured its ancient charter seemed to wave a ghostly benediction
over its ancient learning. Clergy and burgesses, council and governor,
planters of Virginia and bishops of London had stood by its birth. It
was the fruit of the union of the old world and the new, and it had
waxed strong upon the milk of its mother ere it turned rebel. Later, to
its younger country, it had sent forth its sons as statesmen who gave
glory to its name. And through all its history it had overcome calamity
and defied assault. Thrice it had fallen and thrice it had rearisen.

He recalled next the sheltered alcove in the dim library, where he had
studied with the consumptive young instructor, who was dead. The
creepers upon the wall were encroaching stealthily upon the alcove
window. Scarlet tendrils, like forked flames, licked the narrow ledge.
Several wet sparrows fluttered in and out among the