Marco lifted his right hand in recognition, as if he had been a young officer.  Most boys might have looked awkward or theatrical in making the gesture, but he made it with naturalness and ease, because he had been familiar with the form since his babyhood.  He had seen officers returning the salutes of their men when they encountered each other by chance in the streets, he had seen princes passing sentries on their way to their carriages, more august personages raising the quiet, recognizing hand to their helmets as they rode through applauding crowds.  He had seen many royal persons and many royal pageants, but always only as an ill-clad boy standing on the edge of the crowd of common people.  An energetic lad, however poor, cannot spend his days in going from one country to another without, by mere every-day chance, becoming familiar with the outer life of royalties and courts.  Marco had stood in continental thoroughfares when visiting emperors rode by with glittering soldiery before and behind them, and a populace shouting courteous welcomes.  He knew where in various great capitals the sentries stood before kingly or princely palaces.  He had seen certain royal faces often enough to know them well, and to be ready to make his salute when particular quiet and unattended carriages passed him by.

“It is well to know them.  It is well to observe everything and to train one’s self to remember faces and circumstances,” his father had said.  “If you were a young prince or a young man training for a diplomatic career, you would be taught to notice and remember people and things as you would be taught to speak your own language with elegance.  Such observation would be your most practical accomplishment and greatest power.  It is as practical for one man as another—­for a poor lad in a patched coat as for one whose place is to be in courts.  As you cannot be educated in the ordinary way, you must learn from travel and the world.  You must lose nothing—­forget nothing.”

It was his father who had taught him everything, and he had learned a great deal.  Loristan had the power of making all things interesting to fascination.  To Marco it seemed that he knew everything in the world.  They were not rich enough to buy many books, but Loristan knew the treasures of all great cities, the resources of the smallest towns.  Together he and his boy walked through the endless galleries filled with the wonders of the world, the pictures before which through centuries an unbroken procession of almost worshiping eyes had passed uplifted.  Because his father made the pictures seem the glowing, burning work of still-living men whom the centuries could not turn to dust, because he could tell the stories of their living and laboring to triumph, stories of what they felt and suffered and were, the boy became as familiar with the old masters—­Italian, German, French, Dutch, English, Spanish—­as he was with most of the countries they had lived in.  They