Light sang in the veins and thoughts of a city. Light cleansed the streets of vapors. Light, the light of the sunshine of late May, made a far different New York from the New York under a blanket of March mist of the day of Jack's arrival. The lantern of the Metropolitan tower was all blazing gold; Diana's scarf trailed behind her in the shimmering abandon of her honi soit qui mal y pense chases on Olympus; Admiral Farragut grew urbane, sailing on a smooth sea with victory won; General Sherman in his over-brightness, guided by his guardian lady, still gallantly pursued the tone of time in the direction of the old City Hall and Trinity; and the marble faÇade of the new library seemed no less at home than under an Agean sky. An ecstasy, blinding eyes to blemishes, set critical faculties to rejoicing over perfections. They graciously overlooked the blotch of red brick hiding the body of St. Patrick's on the way up town in gratitude for twin spires against the sky.

Enveloping radiance gilded the sharp lines of skyscrapers and swept away the shadows in the chasms between them. It pointed the bows of busy tugs with sprays of diamonds falling on the molten surface of rivers and bays. It called up paeans of childish trebles from tenement alleys; slipped into the sickrooms of private houses, delaying the advent of crape on the door; and played across the rows of beds in the public wards of hospitals in the primal democracy of the gift of ozone to the earth.

The milky glass roof of the central court of the Wingfield store acted as a screen to the omnipotent visitor, but he set unfiltered patches of delight in the aisles and on the counters near the walls. Mamie Devore and Burleigh and Peter Mortimer and many other clerks and employees asked if this were like a desert day and Jack said that it was. He longed to be free of all roofs and feel the geniality of the hearth-fire of the planetary system penetrating through his coat, his skin, his flesh, into his very being. Why not close the store and make a holiday for everybody? he asked himself; only to be amazed, on second thought, at such a preposterous suggestion from a hundred-dollar-a-week author of created profits in the business. He was almost on the point of acting on another impulse, which was that he and his father break away into the country in a touring car, not knowing where they were going to stop until hunger overtook an inn. This, too, he dismissed as a milder form of the same demoralizing order of heresy, bound to be disturbing to the new filial relations springing from the night when he had told his desert story over the coffee, which, contrary to the conventional idea of an exchange of confidences clearing the mind of a burden, had only provoked more restlessness.

At least, he would fare forth for a while on the broad asphalt trail that begins under the arch of the little park and runs to the entrance of the great park. Even as the desert has its spell of overawing stillness in an uninhabited land, so this trail had its spell of congested human movement in the heart of habitations. A broad, luminous blade lay across the west side of the street and left the other in shade; and all the world that loved sunshine and had no errands on the east side kept to the west side. There was a communism of inspiration abroad. It was a conqueror's triumph just to be alive and feel the pulse-beat of the throng. The very over-developed sensitiveness of city nerves became something to be thankful for in providing the capacity for keener enjoyment as compensation for the capacity for keener pain.

Womankind was in spring plumage. The mere consciousness of the value of light to their costumes, no less than the elixir in their nostrils, gave vivacity to their features. As usual, Jack was seeing them only to see Mary. The creation of no couturier could bear rivalry with the garb in which his imagination clothed her. He found himself suddenly engrossed in a particular exhibit of fashion's parade a little distance ahead and going in the same direction as himself, a young woman in a simplicity of gown to which her carriage gave the final touch of art. Her steps had a long-limbed freedom and lightness, with which his own steps ran in a rhythm to the music of some past association. The thrall of a likeness, which more and more possessed him, made him hasten to draw near for a more satisfying glimpse.

The young woman turned her head to glance into a shop-window and then there could be no mistaking that cheek and chin and the peculiar relation of the long lashes to the brow. It was the profile whose imprint had become indelible on his mind when he had come round an elbow of rock on Galeria. The Jack of wild, tumultuous pleading who had parted from Mary Ewold on the pass became a Jack elate with the glad, swimming joy of May sunshine at seeing and speaking to her again.

"Mary! Mary!" he cried. "My, but you've become a grand swell!" he breathed delectably, with a fuller vision of her.

"Jack!"

There was a nervous twitching of her lips. He saw her eyes at first in a blaze of surprise and wonder; then change to the baffling sparkle, hiding their depths, of the slivers of glass on the old barrier. His smile and hers in unspoken understanding said that two comrades of another trail had met on the Avenue trail. There had not been any Leddy; there had not been any scene on the pass. They were back to the conditions of the protocol he had established when they started out from the porch of the Ewold bungalow in the airiest possible mood to look at a parcel of land.

"And you also have become a grand swell!" she said. "Did you expect that I should be in a gray riding-habit? Certainly I didn't expect to see you in chaps and spurs."

It was brittle business; but with a common resource in play they managed it well. And there they were walking together, noted by passers-by for their youth and beaming oblivion to everything but themselves.

"How long have you been here?" Jack asked.

"Two weeks," she answered.

Two weeks in the same town and this his first glimpse of her! What a maze
New York was! What a desert waste of two weeks!

"Yes. Our decision to come was rather abrupt," she explained. "A sudden call to travel came to father; came to him like an inspiration that he could not resist. And how happily he has entered into the spirit of the city again! It has made him young."

"And it has been quite like martyrdom for you!" Jack put in, teasingly.

"Terrible! Sackcloth and ashes!"

"I see you are wearing the sackcloth."

She laughed outright, with a downward glance at her gown, at once in guilt and appreciation.

"Another whim of father's."

"The Doge a scapegoat for fashion!"

"Not a scapegoat—a partisan! He insisted on going to one of the best places. Could I resist? I wanted to see how I felt, how I appeared."

"The veritable curiosity of a Japanese woman getting her first foreign gown!"

"Thank you! That is another excuse."

"And it certainly looks very well," Jack declared.

"Do you think so?" Mary flushed slightly. She could not help being pleased. "After six years, could I drop back into the old chrysalis naturally, without awkwardness? Did I still know how to wear a fine gown?"—and the gift for it, as anyone could see, was born in her as surely as certain gifts were born in Jack. "But," she added, severely, "I have only two—just two! And the cost of them! It will take the whole orange crop!"

Just two, when she ought to have twenty! When he would have liked to put all the Paris models in the store in a wagon and, himself driving, deliver them at her door!

"Having succumbed to temptation, I enjoy it out of sheer respect to the orange crop," Mary said; "and yes, because I like beautiful gowns; wickedly, truly like them! And I like the Avenue, just as I like the desert."

And all that she liked he could give her! And all that he could give she had stubbornly refused!

The liveliness of her expression, the many shades of meaning that she could set capering with a glance, were now as the personal reflection of the day and the scene. Their gait was a sauntering one. They went as far as the Park and started back, as if all the time of the desert were theirs. They stopped to look into the windows of shops of every kind, from antiques to millinery. When he saw a hat which he declared, after deliberate, critical appraisement, would surely become her, she asked boldly if it were better than the one she wore.

"I mean an extra hat; that one more hat would have the good fortune of becoming you!"

"Almost a real contribution to the literature of compliments!" she answered, unruffled.

He thought, too, that she ought to have a certain necklace in a jeweler's window.

"To wear over my riding-habit or when I am digging in the flower beds?" she inquired.

When they passed a display of luxuries for masculine adornment, she found a further retort in suggesting that he ought to have a certain giddy fancy waistcoat. He complimented her on her taste, bought the waistcoat and, going to the rear of the shop, returned wearing it with a momentarily appreciated show of jaunty swagger.

"Why be on the Avenue and not buy?" he queried, enthusing with a new idea.

Jim Galway should have a cowpuncher hat as a present. The style of band was a subject of discussion calling on their discriminative views of Jim's personal tastes. This led to thoughts of others in Little Rivers who would appreciate gifts, and to the purchase of toys for the children, a positive revel. When they were through it was well past noon and they were in the region of the restaurants. The sun in majestic altitude swept the breadth of the Avenue.

"Shall we lunch—yes, and in the Best Swell Place?" he asked, as if it were a matter-of-course part of the programme, while inwardly he was stirred with the fear of her refusal. He felt that any minute she might leave him, with no alternative but another farewell. She hesitated a moment seriously, then accepted blithely and naturally.

"Yes, the Best Swell Place—let's! Who isn't entitled to the Best Swell
Place occasionally?"

After an argument in comparison of famous names, they were convinced that they had really chosen the Best Swell Place by the fact of a vacant table at a window looking out over a box hedge. Jack told the waiter that the assemblage was not an autocracy, but a parliament which, with a full quorum present, would enjoy in discursive appreciation selections from the broad range of a bill of fare.

A luncheon for two narrows a walk on the Avenue, where you are part of a crowd, into restricted intimacy. He was feeling the intoxication of her inscrutability, catching gleams of the wealth that lay beyond it, across the limited breadth of a table-cloth. He forgot about the unspoken conditions in a sally which was like putting his hand on top of the barrier for an impetuous leap across.

"I wrote you stacks of letters," he said, "and you never sent me one little line; not even 'Yours received and contents noted!'"

In a flash all intimacy vanished. She might have been at the other end of the dining-room in somebody else's party nodding to him as to an acquaintance. Her answer was delayed about as long as it takes to lift an arrow from a quiver and notch it in a bowstring.

"A novel may be very interesting, but that does not mean that I write to the author!"

He imagined her going through the meal in polite silence or in measured commonplaces, turning the happy parliament into a frigid Gothic ceremony. Why had he not kept in mind that sufficient to the hour is the pleasure of it? Famished for her companionship, a foolhardy impulse of temptation had risked its loss. The waiter set something before them and softly withdrew. Jack signaled the unspoken humility of being a disciplined soldier at attention on his side of the barrier and Mary signaled a trifle superior but good-natured acceptance of his apology and promise of better conduct.

They were back to the truce of nonsense, apostrophizing the cooking of the Best Swell Place, setting exclamations to their glimpses of people passing in the street. For they had never wanted for words when talking across the barrier; there was paucity of conversation only when he threatened an invasion.

While a New Yorker meeting a former New Yorker on the desert might have little to tell not already chronicled in the press, a Little Riversite meeting a former Little Riversite in New York had a family budget of news. How high were Jack's hedges? How were the Doge's date-trees? How was this and that person coming on? Listening to all the details, Jack felt homesickness creeping over him, and he clung fondly to every one of the swiftly-passing moments. By no reference and by no inference had she suggested that there was ever any likelihood of his meeting or hearing from her again. A thread of old relations had been spun only to be snapped. She was, indeed, as a visitation developed out of the sunshine of the Avenue, into which she would dissolve.

"I was to meet father at a bookstore at three," she said, finally, as she rose.

"Inevitably he would be there or in a gallery," said Jack.

"He has done the galleries. This is the day for buying books—still more books! I suppose he is spending the orange crop again. If you keep on spending the same orange crop, just where do you arrive in the maze of finance?"

"I should not like to say without consulting the head book-keeper or, at least, Peter Mortimer!"

They were coming out of the door of the Best Swell Place, now. A word and she would be going in one direction and he in another. How easily she might speak that word, with an electric and final glance of good-will!

"But I must say howdy do to the Doge!" he urged. "I should like to see him buying books. What a prodigal debauch of learning! I cannot miss that!"

"It is not far," she said, prolonging Paradise for him.

A few blocks below Forty-second Street they turned into a cross street which was the same that led to the Wingfield house; and halfway to Madison Avenue they entered a bookstore. The light from low windows spreading across the counters blended with the light from high windows at the back, and here, on a platform at the head of the stairs, before a big table sat the Doge, in the majesty of a great patron of literature, with a clerk standing by in deftly-urging attentiveness. Mary and Jack paused at the foot of the stairs watching him. Gently he was fingering an old octavo; fingering it as one would who was between the hyperionic desire of possession and a fear that a bank account owed its solvency to keeping the amounts of deposits somewhere in proportion to the amount of withdrawals.

"No, sir! No more, you tempter!" he declared. "No more, you unctuous ambassador from the court of Gutenberg! Why, this one would take enough alfalfa at the present price a ton to bury your store under a haycock as high as the Roman Pantheon!"

The Doge rose and picked up his broad-brimmed hat, prepared to fly from danger. He would not expose himself a moment longer to the wiles of that clerk.

"I'll wait for my daughter down there in the safe and economical environs of the popular novels fresh from the press!" he said.

Turning to descend the stairs he saw the waiting pair. He stopped stock still and threw up his hand in a gesture of astonishment. His glance hovered back and forth between Jack's face and Mary's, and then met Jack's look with something of the same challenge and confidence of his farewell on the road out of Little Rivers, and in an outburst of genial raillery he began the conversation where he had left off with the final call of his personal good wishes and his salutations to certain landmarks of New York.

"Well, well, Sir Chaps! I saw Sorolla in his new style; very different from the academics of the young Sorolla. He has found his mission and let himself go. No wonder people flocked to his exhibitions on misty days! The trouble with our artists is that they are afraid to let themselves go, afraid to be popular. They think technique is the thing, when it is only the tool. Why, confound it all! all the great masters were popular in their day—Venetian, Florentine, Flemish! Confound it, yes! And not one Velasquez"—evidently he was talking partly to get his bearings after his shock at seeing Jack—"no, not one Velasquez in the Metropolitan! I go home without seeing a Velasquez. They have the Catherine Lorillard Wolfe collection, thousands of square yards of it, and yes, cheer up! Thank heaven, they have some great Americans, Inness and Martin and Homer and our exile Whistler, who annexed Japan, and our Sargent, born in Florence. And I did see the Metropolitan tower. I take off my hat, my broad-brimmed hat, wishing that it were as big as a carter's umbrella, to that tower. I hate to think it an accident of chaos like the Grand Canyon. I rather like to think of it as majestic promise."

The Doge had talked so fast that he was almost out of breath. He was ready to yield the floor to Jack.

"I kissed my hand to Diana for you!" said Jack. "And what do you think? The lady in answer shook out her scarf and something white and small fluttered down. I picked it up. It was a note."

"Did you open that note?" asked the Doge in haughty suspicion.

"Naturally."

"Wasn't it marked personal for me?"—this in fine simulation of indignation.

"Without address!"

"I am chagrined and surprised at Diana," said the Doge ruefully. "It's the effect of city association. As a matter of course, she ought to have given it to Mercury, or at least to one of the Centaurs, considering all the horseshows that have been held under her skipping toes! Well, what did she say? Being a woman of action she was brief. What did she say?"

"It was in the nature of a general personal complaint. Her costume is in need of repair; it is flaking disgracefully. She said that if you had not forsaken your love of the plastic for love of the graphic arts you would long ago have stolen a little gold off the Eternal Painter's palette, just to clothe her decently for the sake of her own self-respect—the town having set her so high that its sense of propriety was quite safe."

"I stand convicted of neglect," said the Doge, coming down to the floor of the store. "I will shoot her a bundle of gold leaf from the top of the pass on a ray of evening sunshine."

There, he gave Jack a pat on the shoulder; a hasty, playful, almost affectionate demonstration, and broke off with a shout of:

"Persiflage, sir, persiflage!"

"It is manna to me!" declared Jack, in the fulness and sweetness of the sensation of the atmosphere of Little Rivers reproduced in New York.

"And not a Velasquez in the Metropolitan!" mused the Doge, bustling along the aisle hurriedly. "Well, Mary, we have errands to do. There is no time to spare."

They were at the door, Jack in wistful insistence, hungry for their companionship, and the Doge and Mary in common hesitancy for a phrase before parting from him. He was ahead of the phrase.

"But there is a Velasquez, one of the greatest of Velasquezes, just a few steps from here! It would take only a minute to see it."

"A Velasquez a few steps from here!" cried the Doge. "Where? Be exact, before I let my hopes rise too high."

"The subject is an ancestor of mine. My father has it."

Jack had looked in the direction of the Wingfield house on the Madison Avenue corner as he spoke, and the Doge had followed his glance. The eagerness passed from the Doge's face, but not its intensity. That was transmuted into something staring and hard.

"A very great Velasquez!" Jack repeated.

"My amour propre!" the Doge said, in whispered abstraction, using the French which so exactly expresses the rightness of an inner feeling that will not let one do a thing however much he may wish to. Then a wave of confusion passed over his face, evidently at the echo of his thoughts in the form of words come unwittingly from his lips. He tried to retrieve his exclamation in an effort at the forensic: "The amour propre of any American is hurt by the thought that he must go to a private gallery to see a Velasquez in the greatest city of the land!"

But it was a lame explanation. Clearly, some old antipathy had been aroused in Jasper Ewold; and it made him hesitate to enter the big red brick house on the corner.

"And we have a wonderful Sargent, too, a Sargent of my mother!" Jack proceeded.

"Yes, yes!" said the Doge, and eagerness returned; a strange, moving eagerness that seemed to come from the same depths as the exclamation that had arrested his acceptance of the invitation at the outset. It held the monosyllables like drops of water trembling before they fell.

"I should like you to see them both," said Jack.

"Yes," said the Doge, the word an echo rather than consent.

"There is no one at home at this hour; you will have all the time you can spare for the pictures."

In the ascendency of his ardor to retain the joy of their company and in the perplexity of mystery injected afresh into his relations with Mary, Jack was hardly conscious that his urging was only another way of saying that his father was absent. And Mary had not thrown her influence either for or against going. She was watching her father, curiously and penetratingly, as if trying to understand the source of the emotion that he was seeking to control.

"Why, in that case," exclaimed the Doge, "why, you see," he went on to explain, "we desert folk, though we are used to galleries, are a little diffident about meeting people who live in big mansions. I mean, people who have not had the desert training that you have had, Sir Chaps. If it is only a matter of looking at a picture without any social responsibilities, and that picture a Velasquez, why, we must take the time, mustn't we, Mary?"

"Yes," Mary assented.

With Mary on one side of him and Jack on the other, the Doge was walking heavily and slowly.

"At what period of Velasquez's career?" he asked, vacantly.

"When he was young and the subject was middle-aged, a Northerner, with fair hair and lean muscles under a skin bronzed by the tropics, and the unquenchable fire of youth in his eyes."

"That ought to be a good Velasquez," said the Doge.

At the bottom step of the flight up to the entrance to the house he hesitated. He appeared to be very old and very tired. His face had gone quite pale. The lids hung heavily over his eyes. Jack dropped back in alarm to assist him; but his color quickly returned and the old challenge was in his glance as it met Jack's.

"Now for your Velasquez!" he exclaimed, with calm vigor.

Once in the hall, Jack stood to one side of the door of the drawing-room to let the Doge enter first. As the old man crossed the threshold his hands were clasped behind him; his shoulders had fallen together, not in weariness now, but in a kind of dazed, studious expectancy; and he faced the "Portrait of a Lady."

"This is the Sargent," he said slowly, his lips barely opening in mechanical and absent comment. "A good Sargent!"

He was as still as the picture in his bowed and earnest gaze into her eyes, except for an occasional nervous movement of the fingers. All the surroundings seemed to melt into a neutral background for the two; there was nothing else in the room but the scholar in his age and the "Portrait of a Lady" in her youth. Jack saw the Doge's face, its many lines expressive as through a mist of time, its hills and valleys in the sun and the shadow of emotions as variable as the mother's in life, speaking personal resentment and wrong, admiration and tenderness, grievous inquiry and philosophy, while the only answer was the radiant, "I give! I give!" Finally, the Doge tightened the clasp of his hands, with a quiver of his frame, as he turned toward Jack.

"Yes, a really great Sargent—a Sargent of supreme inspiration!" he said.
"Now for your Velasquez!"

Before the portrait of the first John Wingfield, Jasper Ewold's head and shoulders recovered their sturdiness of outline and his features lighted with the veritable touch of the brush of genius itself. He was the connoisseur who understands, whose joy of possession is in the very tingling depths of born instinct, rich with training and ripened by time. It was superior to any bought title of ownership. In the presence of a supreme standard, every shade of discriminative criticism and appraisal became threads woven into a fabric of rapture.

"Mary," he said, his voice having the mellowness of age in its deep appreciation, "Mary, wherever you saw this—skied or put in a corner among a thousand other pictures, in a warehouse, a Quaker meetinghouse, anywhere, whatever its surroundings—should you feel its compelling power? Should you pause, incapable of analysis, in a spell of tribute?"

"Yes, I don't think I am quite so insensible as not to realize the greatness of this portrait, or that of the Sargent, either," she answered.

"Good! I am glad, Mary, very glad. You do me credit!"

Now he turned from the artist to the subject. He divined the kind of man the first John Wingfield was; divined it almost as written in the chronicle which Jack kept in his room in hallowed fraternity. Only he bore hard on the unremitting, callous, impulsive aggressiveness of a fierce past age, with its survival of the fittest swordsmen and buccaneers, which had no heroes for him except the painters, poets, and thinkers it gave to posterity.

"Fire-eating old devil! And the best thing he ever did, the best luck he ever had, was attracting the attention of a young artist. It's immortality just to be painted by Velasquez; the only immortality many a famous man of the time will ever know!"

He looked away from the picture to Jack's face keenly and back at the picture and back at Jack and back at the picture once more.

"Yes, yes!" he mused, corroboratively; and Jack realized that at the same time Mary had been making the same comparison.

"Very like!" she said, with that impersonal exactness which to him was always the most exasperating of her phases.

Then the Doge returned to the Sargent. He was standing nearer the picture, but in the same position as before, while Jack and Mary waited silently on his pleasure; and all three were as motionless as the furniture, had it not been for the nervous twitching of the Doge's fingers. He seemed unconscious of the passing of time; a man in a maze of absorption with his thoughts. Jack was strangely affected. His brain was marking time at the double-quick of fruitless energy. He felt the atmosphere of the room surcharged with the hostility of the unknown. He was gathering a multitude of impressions which only contributed more chaos to chaos. His sensibilities abnormally alive to every sound, he heard the outside door opened with a latch-key; he heard steps in the hall, and saw his father's figure in the doorway of the drawing-room.

John Wingfield, Sr. appeared with a smile that was gone in a flash.
His face went stark and gray as stone under a frown from the Doge to
Jack; and with an exclamation of the half-articulate "Oh!" of
confusion, he withdrew.

Jack looked around to see the Doge half turned in the direction of the door, gripping the back of a chair to steady himself, while Mary was regarding this sudden change in him in answer to the stricken change in the intruder with some of Jack's own paralysis of wonder. The Doge was the first to speak. He fairly rocked the chair as he jerked his hand free of its support, while he shook with a palsy which was not that of fear, for there was raging color in his cheeks. The physical power of his great figure was revealed. For the first time Jack was able to think of him as capable of towering militancy. His anger gradually yielded to the pressure of will and the situation. At length he said faintly, with a kind of abyssmal courtesy:

"Thank you, Sir Chaps! Now I shall not go back to the desert without having seen a Velasquez. Thank you! And we must be going."

Jack had an impulse, worthy of the tempestuous buccaneer of the picture, to call to his father to come down; and then to bar the front door until his burning questions were heard. The still light in Mary's eyes would have checked him, if not his own proper second thought and the fear of precipitating an ungovernable crisis. There had been shadows, real shadows, he was thinking wildly; they were not born of desert imaginings; and out of the quandary of his anguish came only the desire not to part from the Doge and Mary in this fashion! No, not until in some way equilibrium of mind was restored.

Though he knew that they did not expect or want his company, he went out into the street with them. He would go as far as their hotel, he remarked, in the bravery of simulated ease. The three were walking in the same relative positions that they had before, with the Doge's bulk hiding Mary from Jack's sight. The Doge set a rapid pace, as if under the impetus of a desire to escape from the neighborhood of the Wingfield house.

"Well, Sir Chaps," he said, after a while, "it will be a long time before the provincials come to New York again. Why, in this New York you can spend a patrimony in two weeks"—this with an affected amusement at his own extravagance—"and I've pretty nearly done it. So we fly from temptation. Yes, Mary, we will take the morning train."

"The morning train!" Mary exclaimed; and her surprise left no doubt that her father's decision was new to her. Was it due to an exchange of glances between a stark face and a face crimson with indignation which Jack had already connected with the working out of his own destiny?

"Yes, that is better than spending our orange crop again!" she hastened to add, with reassuring humor. "I'm fairly homesick for our oasis."

"We've had our fill of the big city," said the Doge, feelingly, "and we are away to our little city of peace where we turned our pasts under with the first furrows in the virgin soil."

Then silence. The truce of nonsense was dead. Persiflage was dead. Jack was as a mute stranger keeping at their side unasked, while the only glimpse he had of Mary was the edge of her hat and her fingertips on her father's sleeve. Silence, which he felt was as hard for them as for him, lasted until they were at the entrance to the quiet little hotel on a cross-town street where the Ewolds were staying; and having the first glimpse of Mary's eyes since they had started, he found nothing fathomable in them except unmistakable relief that the walk was over.

"Thank you for showing me the Velasquez," said the Doge.

"Thank you, Jack," Mary added.

Both spoke in a manner that signaled to him the end of all things, but an end which he could not accept.

"I—I—oh, there are a thousand questions I—" he broke out, desperately.

The muscles of his face tightened. Unconsciously he had leaned forward toward the Doge in his intensity, and his attitude had become that of the Wingfield of the portrait. A lower note of command ran through the misery of his tone.

Jasper Ewold stared at him in a second of scrutiny, at once burningly analytic and reflective. Then he flushed as he had at sight of the figure in the drawing-room doorway. His look plainly said: "How much longer do you mean to harass me?" as if Jack's features were now no less the image of a hard and bitter memory than those of John Wingfield, Sr. Jack drew back hurt and dumb, in face of this anger turned on himself. At length, the Doge mustered his rallying smile, which was that of a man who carries into his declining years a burden of disappointments which he fears may, in his bad moments, get the better of his personal system of philosophy.

"Come, Mary!" he said, drawing his arm through hers. He became, in an evident effort, a grand, old-fashioned gentleman, making a bow of farewell. "Come, Mary, it's an early train and we have our packing yet to do."

This time it was, indeed, dismissal; such a dismissal with polite urgency as a venerable cabinet minister might give an importunate caller who is slow to go. He and Mary started into the hotel. But he halted in the doorway to say over his shoulder, with something of his old-time cheer, which had the same element of pity as his leave-taking on the trail outside of Little Rivers:

"Luck, Sir Chaps!"

"Luck!" Mary called in the same strained tone that she had called to Jack when he went over the pass on his way to New York, the tone that was like the click of a key in the lock of a gate.