“When he was young and the subject was middle-aged, a Northerner, with fair hair and lean muscles under a skin bronzed by the tropics, and the unquenchable fire of youth in his eyes.”

“That ought to be a good Velasquez,” said the Doge.

At the bottom step of the flight up to the entrance to the house he hesitated.  He appeared to be very old and very tired.  His face had gone quite pale.  The lids hung heavily over his eyes.  Jack dropped back in alarm to assist him; but his color quickly returned and the old challenge was in his glance as it met Jack’s.

“Now for your Velasquez!” he exclaimed, with calm vigor.

Once in the hall, Jack stood to one side of the door of the drawing-room to let the Doge enter first.  As the old man crossed the threshold his hands were clasped behind him; his shoulders had fallen together, not in weariness now, but in a kind of dazed, studious expectancy; and he faced the “Portrait of a Lady.”

“This is the Sargent,” he said slowly, his lips barely opening in mechanical and absent comment.  “A good Sargent!”

He was as still as the picture in his bowed and earnest gaze into her eyes, except for an occasional nervous movement of the fingers.  All the surroundings seemed to melt into a neutral background for the two; there was nothing else in the room but the scholar in his age and the “Portrait of a Lady” in her youth.  Jack saw the Doge’s face, its many lines expressive as through a mist of time, its hills and valleys in the sun and the shadow of emotions as variable as the mother’s in life, speaking personal resentment and wrong, admiration and tenderness, grievous inquiry and philosophy, while the only answer was the radiant, “I give!  I give!” Finally, the Doge tightened the clasp of his hands, with a quiver of his frame, as he turned toward Jack.

“Yes, a really great Sargent—­a Sargent of supreme inspiration!” he said.  “Now for your Velasquez!”

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.