t telling!"

"It is such a remarkable story, father, it ought not to be spoiled by
giving away its plot," she said, with assumed lightness. "I don't feel
equal to doing full justice to it until after I've had my bath. I will
tell you at breakfast. That's a reason for your waiting for me."

And she hastened past him into the house.

"Was it--was it something to do with this Wingfield?" he called excitedly
after her.

"Yes, about the fellow of the enormous spurs--Senor Don't Care, as
Ignacio calls him," she answered from the stair.

Some note underneath her nonchalance seemed to disturb, even to distress
him. He entered the house and started through the living-room on his way
to the library. But he paused as if in answer to a call from one of the
four photographs on the wall, Michael Angelo's young David, in the
supple ease of grace. The David which Michael made from an imperfect
piece of marble! The David which sculptors say is ill-proportioned! The
David into which, however, the master breathed the thing we call genius,
in the bloom of his own youth finding its power, even as David found his
against Goliath.

This David has come out of the unknown, over the hills, with the dew of
morning freshness on his brow. He is unconscious of self; of everything
except that he is unafraid. If all other aspirants have failed in downing
the old champion, why, he will try.

Now, Jasper Ewold frowned at David as if he were getting no answer to a
series of questions.

"I must make a change. You have been up a long time, David," he
thought; for he had many of these photographs which he kept in a
special store-room subject to his pleasure in hanging. "Yes, I will
have a Madonna--two Madonnas, perhaps, and a Velasquez and a Rembrandt
next time."

In the library he set to reading Professor Giuccamini; but he found
himself disagreeing with the professor.

"I want your facts which you have dug out of the archives," he said,
speaking to the book as if it were alive. "I don't want your opinions.
Confound it!" he threw Giuccamini on the table. "I'll make my own
opinions! Nothing else to do out here on the desert. Time enough to
change them as often as I want, too."

He went into the garden--the garden which, next to Mary, was the most
intimate thing in his affections. Usually, every new leaf that had burst
forth over night set itself in the gelatine of his mind like so many
letterpress changes on a printed page to a proof-reader. T