When he returned to the house, Jack found a letter that had come in the late mail from Jim Galway:

"First off, that story you sent for Belvy," Jim wrote. "We've heard it read and reread, and the more it's worn with reading the fresher it gets in our minds. As I size up the effect on the population, we folks in the forties and fifties got more fun out of it than anybody except the folks in the seventies and the five-to-twelve-year-olds. Some of the thirteen and fourteen-year-olds were inclined to think at first that it wasn't quite grown up enough for them, until they saw what fashionable literature it was becoming. Then their dignified maturity limbered up a little. Jack, it certainly did us a world of good. It seemed as if you were back home again."

"Back home again!" Jack repeated, joyously; and then shook his head at himself in solemn warning.

"And those of us that don't take our meat without salt sort of needed cheering up," Jim went on. "Only a few days after I wrote you, the Doge and Mary suddenly started for New York. Maybe he has looked you up." (The "maybe" followed an "of course," which had been scratched through.) "And maybe if he has you know more about what is going on here than we do. We practically don't know anything; but I've sure got a feeling of that uncertainty in the atmosphere that I used to have before a cyclone when I lived in Kansas. This Prather, that so many thought at first looked like you, has also gone to New York.

"He left only two days ago. Maybe you will run across him. I don't know, but it seems to me he's gone to get the powder for some kind of a blow-up here. Jack, you know what would happen if we lost our water rights and you know what I wrote you in my last letter. Leddy and Ropey Smith are hanging around all the time, and since the Doge went a whole lot of fellows that don't belong to the honey-bee class have been turning up and putting up their tents out on the outskirts, like they expected something to happen. If things get worse and I've got something to go on and we need you, I'm going to telegraph just as I said I would; because, Jack, though you're worth a lot of millions, someway we feel you're one of us.

"Very truly yours for Little Rivers,

"JAMES R. GALWAY.

"P.S.—Belvy said to put in P.S. because P.S.'s are always the most important part of a letter. She wants to know if you won't write another story."

"I will!" said Jack. "I will, immediately!"

He made it a long story. He took a deal of pains with it in the very relief of something to do when sleep was impossible and he must count the moments in wretched impatience until his interview with the one person who could answer his questions.

As he went down town in the morning the very freshness of the air inspired him with the hope that he should come out of his father's office with every phantom reduced to a figment of imagination springing from the abnormality of his life-story; with a message that should allay Mary's fears and soften her harshness toward him; with the certainty that the next time he and his father sat together at dinner it would be in a permanent understanding, craved of affection. Mary might come to New York; the Doge might spend his declining years in leisurely patronage of bookshops and galleries; and he would learn how to run the business, though his head split, as became a simple, normal son.

These eddying thoughts on the surface of his mind, however, could not free him of a consciousness of a deep, unsounded current that seemed to be the irresistible, moving power of Mary's future, the store's, his fathers, Jasper Ewold's and his own. With it he was going into a gorge, over a cataract, or out into pleasant valleys, he knew not which. He knew nothing except that there was no stopping the flood of the current which had its source in streams already flowing before he was born. When the last question had been asked his future would be clear. Relief was ahead, and after relief would come the end of introspection and the beginning of his real career.

But another question was waiting for him in the store. It was walking the streets of his father's city in the freedom of a spectator who comes to observe and not to buy. Crossing the first floor as he came to the court, Jack saw, with sudden distinctness among the many faces coming and going, a profile which, in its first association, developed on his vision as that of his own when he shaved in front of the ear in the morning. He had only a glimpse before it was turned away and its owner, a young man in a quiet gray suit, started up the stairs.

Jack studied the young man's back half amusedly to see if this, too, were like his own, and laughed at himself because he was sure that he would not know his own back if it were preceding him in a promenade up the Avenue. In peculiar suspense he was hoping that the young man would pause and look around, as his father always did and shoppers often did, in a survey of the busy, moving picture of the whole floor. But the young man went on to the top of the flight. There he proceeded along the railing of the court. His profile was again in view under a strong light, and Jack realized that his first recognition of a resemblance was the recognition of an indisputable fact.

"Have I a double out West and another in New York?" he thought. "It gives a man a kind of secondhand feeling!"

Then he recalled Jim's letter saying that John Prather had gone to New York. Was this John Prather? He had no doubt that it was when the object of his scrutiny, with full face in view, stopped and leaned over the balcony just above the diamond counter. There was a mole patch on the cheek such as Jack remembered that the accounts of John Prather had mentioned.

"I am as much fussed as the giant was at the sight of yellow!"
Jack mused.

But for the mole patch the features were his own, as he knew them, though no one not given to more frequent personal councils with mirrors than SeÑor Don't Care of desert trails knows quite the lights and shadows of his own countenance, which give it its character even more than does its form. John Prather was regarding the jewelry display, where the diamonds were scintillating under the light from the milk glass roof, with a smile of amused contemplation. His expression was unpleasant to Jack. It had a quality of satire and of covetousness as its owner leaned farther over the rail and rubbed the palms of his hands together as gleefully as if the diamonds were about to fly into his pockets by enchantment.

All the time Jack had stood motionless in fixed and amazed observation.
He wondered that his stare had not drawn the other's attention. But John
Prather seemed too preoccupied with the dazzle of wealth to be
susceptible to any telepathic influence.

"Great heavens! I am gaping at him as if he were climbing hand over hand up the face of a sky-scraper!" Jack thought. It was time something happened. Why should he get so wrought up over the fact that another man looked like him? "I'll get acquainted!" he declared, shaking himself free of his antipathy. "We are both from Little Rivers and that's a ready excuse for introducing myself."

As he started across the floor toward the stairs, Prather straightened from his leaning posture. For an instant his glance seemed to rest on Jack. Indeed, eye met eye for a flash; and then Prather moved away. His decision to go might easily have been the electric result of Jack's own decision to join him. Jack ran up the stairs. At the head of the flight he saw, at half the distance across the floor, Prather's back entering an elevator on the down trip. He hurried forward, his desire to meet and speak with the man whose influence Jim Galway and Mary feared now overwhelming.

"Hello!" Jack sang out; and this to Prather's face after he had turned around in the elevator.

In the second while the elevator man was swinging to the door, Jack and Prather were fairly looking at each other. Prather had seen that Jack wanted to speak to him, even if he had not heard the call. His answer was a smile of mixed recognition and satire. He made a gesture of appreciative understanding of the distinction in their likeness by touching the mole on his cheek with his finger, which was Jack's last glimpse of him before he was shot down into the lower regions of the store.

"He did it neatly!" Jack gasped, with a sense of defeat and chagrin. "And it is plain that he does not care to get acquainted. Perhaps he takes it for granted that I am not friendly and foresaw that I would ask him a lot of questions about Little Rivers that he would not care to answer." At all events, the only way to accept the situation was lightly, his reason insisted. "Having heard about the likeness, possibly he came to the store to have a look at me, and after seeing me felt that he had been libeled!"

But his feelings refused to follow his reason in an amused view.

"I do not like John Prather!" he concluded, as he took the next elevator to the top floor. "Yes, I liked Pete Leddy better at our first meeting. I had rather a man would swear at me than smile in that fashion. It is much more simple."

The incident had had such a besetting and disagreeable effect that Jack would have found it difficult to rid his mind of it if he had not had a more centering and pressing object in prospect in the citadel of the push-buttons behind the glass marked "Private."

John Wingfield, Sr. looked up from his desk in covert watchfulness to detect his son's mood, and he was conscious of a quality of manner that recalled the returning exile's entry into the same room upon his arrival from the West.

"Well, Jack," the father said, with marked cheeriness, "I hear you have been taking a holiday. It's all right, and you will find motoring beats pony riding."

"In some ways," Jack answered; and then he came a step nearer, his hand resting on the edge of the desk, as he looked into his father's eyes with glowing candor.

John Wingfield, Sr.'s eyes shifted to the pushbuttons and later to a paper on the desk, with which his fingers played gently. He realized instantly that something unusual was on Jack's mind.

"Father," Jack went on, "I want a long talk quite alone with you. When it is over I feel that we shall both know each other better; we can work together in a fuller understanding."

"Yes, Jack," answered the father, cautiously feeling his way with a swift upward glance, which fell again to the paper. "Well, what is it now? Come on!"

"There are a lot of questions I want to ask—family questions."

"Family questions?" The fingers paused in playing with the paper for an instant and went on playing again. The soft hands were as white as the paper. "Family questions, eh? Well, there isn't much to our family except you and I and that old ancestor—and a long talk, you say?"

"Yes. I thought that probably this would be a good time; you could give me an hour now. It might not take that long."

Jack's voice was even and engaging and respectful. But it seemed to fill the room with many echoing whispers.

"I have a very busy day before me," the father said, still without looking up. He was talking to a little pad at one corner of the green blotter which had a list of his appointments. "Your questions are not so imperative that they cannot wait?"

"Then shall it be at dinner?" Jack asked.

"At dinner? No. I have an engagement for dinner."

"Shall you be home early? Shall I wait up for you?" Jack persisted.

"Yes, that's it! Say at nine. I'll make a point of it—in the library at nine!" John Wingfield, Sr.'s hand slipped away from the papers and patted the back of Jack's hand. "And come on with your questions. I will answer every one that I can." He was looking up at Jack now, smilingly and attractively in his frankness. "Every one that I can, from the first John Wingfield right down to the present!"

But the hand that lay on Jack's was cold and its movement nervous and spasmodic.

"Thank you, father. I knew you would. I haven't forgotten your wish that I should bring all my doubts and questions to you," said Jack, happily. And in an impulse which had the devoutness of a rising hope he took that cold, soft hand in both of his and gave it a shake; and the feel of the son's grip, firm and warm, remained with John Wingfield, Sr. while he stared at the door through which Jack had passed out. When he had pulled himself together he asked Mortimer to connect him with Dr. Bennington.

"Doctor, I want a little talk with you to-night before nine," he said.
"Could you dine with me—not at the house—say at the club?
Yes—excellent—and make it at seven. Yes. Good-by!"