“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 by nature or training to do anything else.

“But sometimes I did long for the centres of civilization; to touch elbows with their activities; to feel the flow of the current of humanity in great streets.  Not that I wanted to give up Little Rivers, but I wanted to go forth to fill the mind with argosies which I could enjoy here at my leisure.  And Mary was young.  The longing that she concealed must be far more powerful than mine.  I saw the supreme selfishness of shutting her up on the desert, without any glimpse of the outer world.  I sensed the call that sent her on her lonely rides to the pass.  I feared that your coming had increased her restlessness.