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 u