“Yes,” said Jack, as if he either were not surprised or were too engrossed to be interested.  To the buccaneer’s “After you, sir; and, then, your finish, sir!” he seemed to be saying, in the fully-lived spirit of imagination:  “A good epitaph, sir!  I’ll see that it is written on your tombstone!”

The father, singularly affected by the mutual and enjoyed challenge that he was witnessing, half expected to see a sword leap out of the scabbard of the canvas and another from Jack’s side.

“If he had lived in our day,” said the father, “he would have built himself a great place; he would have been the head of a great institution, just as I am.”

“Two centuries is a long way to fetch a comparison,” answered Jack, hazily, out of a corner of his brain still reserved for conversation, while all the rest of it was centered elsewhere.  “He might have been a cow-puncher, a revolutionist, or an aviator.  Certainly, 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!”