inly, he would never
have been a camp-follower."

"At all events, a man of power. It's in the blood!"

"It's in the blood!" Jack repeated, with a sort of staring, lingering
emphasis. He was hearing Mary's protest on the pass; her final,
mysterious reason for sending him away; her "It's not in the blood!"
There could be no connection between this and the ancestor; yet, in the
stirred depths of his nature, probing the inheritance in his veins, her
hurt cry had come echoing to his ears.

"Why, I would have paid double the price rather than not have got that
picture!" the father went on. "There is a good deal of talk about family
trees in this town and a strong tendency in some quarters for second
generations of wealth to feel a little superiority over the first
generation. Here I come along with an ancestor eight generations back,
painted by Velasquez. I tell you it was something of a sensation when I
exhibited him in the store!"

"You--you--" and Jack glanced at his father perplexedly; "you exhibited
him in the store!" he said.

"Why, yes, as a great Velasquez I had just bought. I didn't advertise him
as my ancestor, of course. Still, the fact got around; yes, the fact got
around, Jack."

While Jack studied the picture, his father studied Jack, whose face and
whose manner of blissful challenge to all comers in the unconcern of easy
fatality and ready blade seemed to grow more and more like that of the
first John Wingfield. At length, Jack passed over to the other side of
the mantel and turned on the reflector over the portrait of his mother;
and, in turn, standing silently before her all his militancy was gone and
in its place came the dreamy softness with which he would watch the
Eternal Painter cloud-rolling on the horizon. And he was like her not in
features, not in the color of hair or eyes, but in a peculiar
sensitiveness, distinguished no less by a fatalism of its own kind than
was the cheery aggressiveness of the buccaneer.

"Yes, father," he said, "that old ruffian forebear of ours could swear
and could kill. But he had the virtue of truth. He could not act or live
a lie. And I guess something else--how supremely gentle he could be
before a woman like her. Velasquez brought out a joyous devil and Sargent
brought out a soul!"

John Wingfield, Sr., who stood by the grate, was drumming nervously on
the mantel. The drumming ceased. The fingers rested rigid and white on
the dark wood. Alive to another manifes