"who gives of himself
unstintedly as you have; who teaches people to bring a tribute of flowers
to a convalescent! Why, to found a town and make the desert bloom--that
is better than to add another book to the weight of library shelves or to
get a picture on the line!"

"Thank you, Jack!" said the Doge, with a flash of his happy manner of
old, while there was the play of fleeting sunshine over the hills and
valleys of his features. "I won't call it persiflage. I am too selfish,
too greedy of a little cheer to call it persiflage. I like the illusion
you suggest."

He was silent for a while, and when he spoke again it was with the tragic
simplicity of one near his climax.

"Your father and I loved the same girl---your mother. It seemed that in
every sympathy of mind and heart she and I were meant to travel the long
highway together. But your father won her with his gift for ingratiation
with the object of his desire, which amounts to a kind of genius. He won
her with a lie and put me in a position that seemed to prove that the
lie was truth. She accepted him in reaction; in an impulse of heart-break
that followed what she believed to be a revelation of my true character
as something far worse than that of idler. I married the woman whom he
had made the object of his well-managed calumny. My wife knew where my
heart was and why I had married her. It is from her that Mary gets her
dark hair and the brown of her cheeks which make her appear so at home on
the desert. Soon after Mary's birth she chose to live apart from me--but
I will not speak further of her. She is long ago dead. I knew that your
mother had left your father. I saw her a few times in Europe. But she
never gave the reason for the separation. She would talk nothing of the
past, and with the years heavy on our shoulders and the memory of what we
had been to each other hovering close, words came with difficulty and
every one was painful. Her whole life was bound up in you, as mine was in
Mary. It was you that kept her from being a bitter cynic; you that kept
her alive.

"Some of the Ewold money that John Wingfield lost was mine. You see how
he kept on winning; how all the threads of his weaving closed in around
me. I came to the desert to give Mary life with the fragments of my
fortune; and here I hope that, as you say, I have done something worthier
than live the life of a wandering, leisurely student who had lapsed into
the observer for want of the capacity