ead 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
expl