The older man shook his head.

“It is not the times, but the man,” he answered.  “The time makes the man, the great man makes his time.”

He leaned his massive old head against the carved back of his chair and looked at the other in his kindly, unambitious optimism.  He had lost most that the world accounts of worth, but life had dealt gently by him, on the whole, since it had never infringed upon the sensitiveness of his self-esteem.

“It’s rough on the man,” Nicholas returned brusquely, and a little later he went out into the night.  He had his periods of depression, when desire seemed greater than duty, as he had his periods of exaltation, when duty seemed greater than desire.  Neither affected, to outward seeming, the course of his life, but each left its mark upon his mental forces.  The chief thing was that he did the work he hated as thoroughly as he did the work he loved.

The spring ripened into summer and the summer chilled into autumn.  He had kept rigidly to his way and to his resolutions.  From neither had he swerved in one regard.  His stepmother, fixing sharp, tired eyes upon him mentally drafted, “After all’s said an’ done, the Lord knows best.”  She believed him to be content, as she had reason to, for he gave no outward uneasy sign.  When his small savings had paid off Amos Burr’s little debt, and they started, unhandicapped, upon their shaky progress, it seemed to her that she was justified in commending, for the second time, the visible methods of Providence—­a commendation which faltered only before a threatening twinge of neuralgia.

Early in October the judge, whose practice was drawn largely from other sections of the State, left home for an absence of several weeks.  Upon his return he sent for Nicholas in the early afternoon, an unusual happening.  The young man, dropping in at two o’clock, found him at work in his library before the early dinner, a generous mint julep upon a silver tray on his desk.  Caesar was an acknowledged artist in the mixing of the beverage, and Mrs. Burwell had once exclaimed that “the judge was prouder of Caesar’s fame at the bar than of his own.”

“It is an art that is becoming extinct, madam,” the judge had replied sadly.  “I should wager there are more men in the State to-day who can make a speech than can mix a julep.  Caesar’s distinction is greater than mine.”

To-day, as Nicholas entered, the judge greeted him hospitably and called for another concoction.  When Caesar brought it, frosted and clear and odorous, the judge raised his own goblet and bowed to his caller.

“To your future, my boy,” he said graciously; then, as Nicholas blushed and stammered, he asked kindly: 

“How are you getting on now?”

“Very well.”

“So well that you wouldn’t like a change?”

Nicholas threw a startled look upon him.  His pulse beat swiftly, and his skin burned.  By these physical reactions he realised the fluttering of his hopes.