One even greater than
I."

Duane had heard the absurd lampoon as a child, and one evening late in
August, smoking his after-dinner cigar beside his father in the empty
conservatory, he recalled the story, which had been one of his father's
favorites.

But Colonel Mallett scarcely smiled, scarcely heard; and his son watched
him furtively. The trim, elastic figure was less upright this summer;
the close gray hair and cavalry mustache had turned white very rapidly
since spring. For the first time, too, in all his life, Colonel Mallett
wore spectacles; and the thin gold rims irritated his ears and the
delicate bridge of his nose. Under his pleasant eyes the fine skin had
darkened noticeably; thin new lines had sprung downward from the
nostrils' clean-cut wings; but the most noticeable change was in his
hands, which were no longer firm and fairly smooth, but were now the
hands of an old man, restless if not tremulous, unsteady in handling the
cigar which, unnoticed, had gone out.

They--father and son--had never been very intimate. An excellent
understanding had always existed between them with nothing deeper in it
than a natural affection and an instinctive respect for each other's
privacy.

This respect now oppressed Duane because long habit, and the understood
pact, seemed to bar him from a sympathy and a practical affection which,
for the first time, it seemed to him his father might care for.

That his father was worried was plain enough; but how anxious and with
how much reason, he had hesitated to ask, waiting for some voluntary
admission, or at least some opening, which the older man never gave.

That night, however, he had tried an opening for himself, offering the
old stock story which had always, heretofore, amused his father. And
there had been no response.

In silence he thought the matter over; his sympathy was always quick; it
hurt him to remain aloof when there might be a chance that he could help
a little.

"It may amuse you," he said carelessly, "to know how much I've made
since I came back from Paris."

The elder man looked up preoccupied. His son went on:

"What you set aside for me brings me ten thousand a year, you know. So
far I haven't touched it. Isn't that pretty good for a start?"

Colonel Mallett sat up straighter with a glimmer of interest in his
eyes.

Duane went on, checking off on his fingers:

"I got fifteen hundred for Mrs. Varick's portrait, the same for Mrs.
James Cray's,