How thankful he was that the old brick corner mansion in Madison Avenue, with age alone to recommend its architecture of the seventies—let it stand for what it was—had not been replaced by one of stone freshly polished each year! The butler who opened the door was new and stiffer than the one of the old days; but he saw that the broad hall, with the stairs running across the rear in their second flight, was little more changed than the exterior.

Five years since he had left that hall! He was in the thrall of anticipation incident to seeing old associations with the eyes of manhood. The butler made to take his hat, but Jack, oblivious of the attention, went on to the doorway of the drawing-room, his look centering on a portrait that faced the door. In this place of honor he saw a Gainsborough. He uttered a note of pained surprise.

"There used to be another portrait here. Where is it?" he demanded.

The butler, who had heard that the son of the house was an invalid, had not recovered from his astonishment at the appearance of health of the returned prodigal.

"Upstairs, sir," he answered. "When Mr. Wingfield got this prize last year, sir—"

Though the butler had spoken hardly a dozen words, he became conscious of something atmospheric that made him stop in the confusion of one who finds that he has been garrulous with an explanation that does not explain.

"Please take this upstairs and bring back the other," said Jack.

"Yes, sir. You will be going to your room, sir, and while—" The butler had a feeling of a troublesome future between two masters.

"Now, please!" said Jack, settling into a chair to wait.

The Gainsborough countess, with her sweeping plumes, her rich, fleshy, soft tones, her charming affectation, which gave you, after the art interest, no more human interest in her than in a draped model, was carried upstairs and back came the picture that it had displaced. The frame still bore at the bottom the title "Portrait of a Lady," under which it had been exhibited at the Salon many years ago. It was by a young artist, young then, named Sargent. He had the courage of his method, this youngster, no less than Hals, who also worked his wonders with little paint when this suited his genius best. The gauze of the gown where it blended with the background at the edge of the line of arm was so thin, seemingly made by a single brush-stroke, that it almost showed the canvas.

A purpose in that gauze: The thinness of transparency of character! The eyes of the portrait alone seemed deep. They were lambent and dark, looking straight ahead inquiringly, yet in the knowledge that no answer to the Great Riddle could change the course of her steps in the blind alley of a life whose tenement walls were lighted with her radiance. You could see through the gown, through the flesh of that frail figure, so lacking in sensuousness yet so glowing with a quiet fire, to the soul itself. She seemed of such a delicate, chaste fragility that she could be shattered by a single harsh touch. There would be no outcry except the tinkle of the fragments. The feelings of anyone who witnessed the breaking and heard the tinkle would be a criterion of his place in the wide margin between nerveless barbarism and sensitive gentility.

"I give! I give! I give!" was her message.

For a long time, he had no measure of it, Jack sat studying the portrait, set clear in many scenes of memory in review. It had been a face as changeful as the travels, ever full of quick lights and quick shadows. He had had flashes of it as it was in the portrait in its very triumph of resignation. He had known it laughing with stories of fancy which she told him; sympathetic in tutorial illumination as she gave him lessons and brought out the meaning of a line of poetry or a painting; beset by the restlessness which meant another period of travel; intense as fire itself, gripping his hands in hers in a defiance of possession; in moods when both its sadness and its playfulness said, "I don't care!" and again, fleeing from his presence to hide her tears.

It was with the new sight of man's maturity and soberness that he now saw his mother, feeling the intangible and indestructible feminine majesty of her; feeling her fragility which had brought forth her living soul in its beauty and impressionableness as a link with the cause of his Odyssey; believing that she was rejoicing in his strength and understanding gloriously that it had only brought him nearer to her.

After he had been to his room to dress he returned to the same chair and settled into the same reverie that was sounding depths of his being that he had never suspected. He was mutely asking her help, asking the support of her frail, feminine courage for his masculine courage in the battle before him; and little tremors of nervous determination were running through him, when he heard his father's footstep and became conscious of his father's presence in the doorway.

There was a moment, not of hesitation but of completing a thought, before he looked up and rose to his feet. In that moment, John Wingfield, Sr. had his own shock over the change in the room. The muscles of his face twitched in irritation, as if his wife's very frailty were baffling invulnerability. Straightening his features into a mask, his eyes still spoke his emotion in a kind of stare of resentment at the picture.

Then he saw his son's shoulders rising above his own and looked into his son's eyes to see them smiling. Long isolated by his power from clashes of will under the roof of his store or his house, the father had a sense of the rippling flash of steel blades. A word might start a havoc of whirling, burning sentences, confusing and stifling as a desert sandstorm; or it might bring a single killing flash out of gathering clouds.

Thus the two were facing each other in a silence oppressive to both, which neither knew how to break, when relief came in the butler's announcement of dinner. Indeed, by such small, objective interruptions do dynamic inner impulses hang that this little thing may have suppressed the lightnings.

The father was the first to speak. He hoped that a first day in New York had brought Jack a good appetite; certainly, he could see that the store had given him a wonderful fit for a rush order.