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A few months before his father died they were in New York and went together to see the collection of that famous plutocratic wholesale picture buyer, Henry Acton.

“Do you see the young Spaniard over there?” said the father, pointing to one of the best-placed pictures in the room.

The son looked at it and was at once struck by the boldness, the imagination with which it was painted. “Acton has it credited to Velasquez,” he said. “It does look something like Velasquez, but it isn’t, I’m certain.”

“That picture was one of my costly mistakes,” continued the elder Grafton. “I bought it as a Velasquez. I was completely taken in—paid eleven thousand dollars for it in Paris about twenty-five years ago. But I soon found out what I’d done. How the critics did laugh at me! When the noise quieted down I sold it. It was shipped back to Paris and they palmed it off on Acton.”

Just then Acton joined them. “We were talking of your Velasquez there,” said the elder Grafton.

Acton grew red—the mention of that picture always put him angrily on the defensive. “Yes; it is a Velasquez. These ignorant critics say it isn’t, but I know a Velasquez when I see one. And I know Velasquez painted that face, or it wasn’t painted. It’ll hang there as a Velasquez while I live, and when I die it’ll hang in the Metropolitan Museum as a Velasquez. If they try to catalogue it any other way they lose my whole collection.”