“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 unconscious of the passing of time; a man in a maze of absorption with his thoughts.  Jack was strangely affected.  His brain was marking time at the double-quick of fruitless energy.  He felt the atmosphere of the room surcharged with the hostility of the unknown.  He was gathering a multitude of impressions which only contributed more chaos to chaos.  His sensibilities abnormally alive to every sound, he heard the outside door opened with a latch-key; he heard steps in the hall, and saw his father’s figure in the doorway of the drawing-room.

John Wingfield, Sr. appeared with a smile that was gone in a flash.  His face went stark and gray as stone under a frown from the Doge to Jack; and with an exclamation of the half-articulate “Oh!” of confusion, he withdrew.

Jack looked around to see the Doge half turned in the direction of the door, gripping the back of a chair to steady himself, while Mary was regarding this sudden change in him in answer to the stricken change in the intruder with some of Jack’s own paralysis of wonder.  The Doge was the first to speak.  He fairly rocked the chair as he jerked his hand free of its support, while he shook with a palsy which was not that of fear, for there was raging color in his cheeks.  The physical power of his great figure was revealed.  For the first time Jack was able to think of him as capable of towering militancy.  His anger gradually yielded to the pressure of will and the situation.  At length he said faintly, with a kind of abyssmal courtesy: