“I should not like to say without consulting the head book-keeper or, at least, Peter Mortimer!”

They were coming out of the door of the Best Swell Place, now.  A word and she would be going in one direction and he in another.  How easily she might speak that word, with an electric and final glance of good-will!

“But I must say howdy do to the Doge!” he urged.  “I should like to see him buying books.  What a prodigal debauch of learning!  I cannot miss that!”

“It is not far,” she said, prolonging Paradise for him.

A few blocks below Forty-second Street they turned into a cross street which was the same that led to the Wingfield house; and halfway to Madison Avenue they entered a bookstore.  The light from low windows spreading across the counters blended with the light from high windows at the back, and here, on a platform at the head of the stairs, before a big table sat the Doge, in the majesty of a great patron of literature, with a clerk standing by in deftly-urging attentiveness.  Mary and Jack paused at the foot of the stairs watching him.  Gently he was fingering an old octavo; fingering it as one would who was between the hyperionic desire of possession and a fear that a bank account owed its solvency to keeping the amounts of deposits somewhere in proportion to the amount of withdrawals.

“No, sir!  No more, you tempter!” he declared.  “No more, you unctuous ambassador from the court of Gutenberg!  Why, this one would take enough alfalfa at the present price a ton to bury your store under a haycock as high as the Roman Pantheon!”

The Doge rose and picked up his broad-brimmed hat, prepared to fly from danger.  He would not expose himself a moment longer to the wiles of that clerk.

“I’ll wait for my daughter down there in the safe and economical environs of the popular novels fresh from the press!” he said.

Turning to descend the stairs he saw the waiting pair.  He stopped stock still and threw up his hand in a gesture of astonishment.  His glance hovered back and forth between Jack’s face and Mary’s, and then met Jack’s look with something of the same challenge and confidence of his farewell on the road out of Little Rivers, and in an outburst of genial raillery he began the conversation where he had left off with the final call of his personal good wishes and his salutations to certain landmarks of New York.

“Well, well, Sir Chaps!  I saw Sorolla in his new style; very different from the academics of the young Sorolla.  He has found his mission and let himself go.  No wonder people flocked to his exhibitions on misty days!  The trouble with our artists is that they are afraid to let themselves go, afraid to be popular.  They think technique is the thing, when it is only the tool.  Why, confound it all! all the great masters were popular in their day—­Venetian, Florentine, Flemish!  Confound it, yes!  And not one Velasquez”—­evidently