A library atmosphere was missing from the Wingfield library, with its heavy panelling and rows of red and blue morocco backs. Rather the suggestion was of a bastion of privacy, where a man of action might make his plans or take counsel at leisure amid rich and mellow surroundings. Here, John Wingfield, Sr. had gained points through post-prandial geniality which he could never have won in the presence of the battery of push-buttons; here, his most successful conceptions had come to him; here, he had known the greatest moments of his life. He was right in saying that he loved his library; but he hardly loved it for its books.

When he returned to the house shortly before nine from his session with Dr. Bennington, it was with the knowledge that another great moment was in prospect. He took a few turns up and down the room before he rang for the butler to tell Jack that he had come in. Then he placed a chair near the desk, where its occupant would sit facing him. After he sat down he moved the desk lamp, which was the only light in the room, so that its rays fell on the back of the chair and left his own face in shadow—a precaution which he had taken on many other occasions in adroitness of stage management. He drew from the humidor drawer of his desk a box of the long cigars with blunt ends which need no encircling gilt band in praise of their quality.

As Jack entered, the father welcomed him with a warm, paternal smile. And be it remembered that John Wingfield, Sr. could smile most pleasantly, and he knew the value of his smile. Jack answered the smile with one of his own, a little wan, a little subdued, yet enlivening under the glow of his father's evident happiness at seeing him. The father, who had transgressed the rules of longevity by taking a second cigar after dinner, now pushed the box across the desk to his son. Jack said that he would "roll one"; he did not care to smoke much. He produced a small package of flake tobacco and a packet of rice paper and with a deftness that was like sleight of hand made a cigarette without spilling a single flake. He had not always chosen the "makings" in place of private stock Havanas, but it seemed to suit his mood to-night.

"That is one of the things you learned in the West," the father observed affably, to break the ice.

"I can do them with one hand," Jack answered. "But you are likely to have an overflow—which is all right when you have the whole desert for the litter. Besides, in a library it would have the effect of gallery play, I fear."

He was seated in a way that revealed all the supple lines of his figure. However relaxed his attitude before his father, it was always suggestive of latent strength, appealing at once to paternal pride and paternal uncertainty as to what course the strength would take. His face under the light of the lamp was boyish and singularly without trace of guile.

The father struck a match and held it to light his son's cigarette; another habit of his which he had found flattering to men who were brought into the library for conference. Jack took a puff slowly and, after a time, another puff, and then dropped the cigarette on the ash receiver as much as to say that he had smoked enough. Something told John Wingfield, Sr. that this was to be a long interview and in no way hurried, as he saw the smile dying on the son's lips and misery coming into the son's eyes.

"These last two days have been pretty poignant for me," Jack began, in a simple, outright fashion; "and only half an hour ago I got this. It was hard to resist taking the first train West." He drew a telegram from his pocket and handed it to his father.

"We want you and though we don't suppose you can come, we simply had to let you know.

"JAMES R. GALWAY."

"It is Greek to me," said the father. "From your Little Rivers friends, I judge."

"Yes. I suppose that we may as well begin with it, as it drove everything else out of my mind for the moment."

John Wingfield, Sr. swung around in his chair, with his face in the shadow. His attitude was that of a companionable listener who is prepared for any kind of news.

"As you will, Jack," he said. "Everything that pertains to you is my interest. Go ahead in your own way."

"It concerns John Prather. I don't know that I have ever told you about him in my talks of Little Rivers."

"John Prather?" The father reflectively sounded the name, the while he studied the spiral of smoke rising from his cigar. "No, I don't think you have mentioned him."

It was Jack's purpose to take his father entirely into his confidence; to reveal his own mind so that there should be nothing of its perplexities which his father did not understand. He might not choose a logical sequence of thought or event, but in the end nothing should be left untold. Indeed, he had not studied how to begin his inquiries. That he had left to take care of itself. His chief solicitude was to keep his mind open and free of bitterness whatever transpired, and it was evident that he was under a great strain.

He told of the coming of John Prather to Little Rivers while he was absent; of the mention of the likeness by his fellow-ranchers; and of the fears entertained by Jim Galway and Mary. When he came to the scene in the store that afternoon it was given in a transparent fulness of detail; while all his changing emotions, from his first glimpse of Prather's profile to the effort to speak with him and the ultimatum of Prather's satirical gesture, were reflected in his features. He was the story-teller, putting his gift to an unpleasant task in illumination of sober fact and not the uses of imagination; and his audience was his father's cheek and ear in the shadow.

"Extraordinary!" John Wingfield, Sr. exclaimed when Jack had finished, glancing around with a shrug. "Naturally, you were irritated. I like to think that only two men have the Wingfield features—the features of the ancestor—yes, only two: you and I!"

"It was more than irritation; it was something profound and disturbing, almost revolting!" Jack exclaimed, under the disagreeable spell of his vivid recollection of the incident. "The resemblance to you was so striking, father, especially in the profile!" Jack was leaning forward, the better to see his father's profile, dim in the half light. "Yes, recognizable instantly—the nose and the lines about the mouth! You have never met anyone who has seen this man? You have never heard of him?" he asked, almost morbidly.

John Wingfield, Sr. broke into a laugh, which was deprecatory and metallic. He looked fairly into Jack's eyes with a kind of inquiring amazement at the boy's overwrought intensity.

"Why, no, Jack," he said, reassuringly. "If I had I shouldn't have forgotten it, you may be sure. And, well, Jack, there is no use of being sensitive about it, though I understand your indignation—especially after he flaunted the fact of the resemblance in such a manner and refused to meet you. From what I have heard about that fight with Leddy—Dr. Bennington told me—I can appreciate why he did not care to meet you." He laughed, more genially this time, in the survey of his son's broad shoulders. "I fear there is something of the old ancestor's devil in you when you get going!" he added.

So his father had seen this, too—what Mary had seen—this thing born in him with the coming of his strength!

"Yes, I suppose there is," he admitted, ruefully. "Yes, I have reason to know that there is."

His face went moody. Any malice toward John Prather passed. He was penitent for a feeling against a stranger that seemed akin to the dormant instinct that had made him glory in holding a bead on Pete Leddy.

"And I am glad of it!" said John Wingfield, Sr., with a flash of stronger emotion than he had yet shown in the interview.

"I am not. It makes me almost afraid of myself," Jack answered.

"Oh, I don't mean firing six-shooters—hardly! I mean backbone," he hastened to add, almost ingratiatingly. "It is a thing to control, Jack, not to worry about."

"Yes, to control!" said Jack, dismally.

He was hearing Ignacio's cry of "The devil is out of SeÑor Don't Care!" and seeing for the thousandth time Mary's horrified face as he pressed Pedro Nogales against the hedge. Now poise was all on the side of the father, who glanced away from Jack at the glint of the library cases in the semi-darkness in satisfaction. But only a moment did the son's absent mood last. He leaned forward quivering, free from his spell of reflection, and his words came pelting like hail. He was at grip with the phantoms and nothing should loosen his hold till the truth was out.

"Father, I could not fail to see the look on your face and the look on
Jasper Ewold's when you found him in the drawing-room!"

At the sudden reversal of his son's attitude, John Wingfield, Sr. had drawn back into the shadow, as, if in defensive instinct before the force that was beating in Jack's voice.

"Yes, I was startled; yes, very startled! But, go on! Speak everything that you have in mind; for it is evident that you have much to say. Go on!" he repeated more calmly, and turned his face farther into the shadow, while he inclined his head toward Jack as if to hear better. One leg had drawn up under him and was pressing against the chair.

Jack waited a moment to gather his thoughts. When he spoke his passion was gone.

"We have always been as strangers, father," he began. "I have no recollection of you in childhood until that day you came as a stranger to the house at Versailles. I was seven, then. My mother was away, as you will recall. I remember that you did not kiss me or show any affection. You did not even say who you were. You looked me over, and I was very frail. I saw that I did not please you; and I did not like you. In my childish perversity I would speak only French to you, which you did not understand. When my mother came home, do you remember her look? I do. She went white as chalk and trembled. I was frightened with the thought that she was going to die. It was a little while before she spoke and when she did speak she was like stone. She asked you what you wanted, as if you were an intruder. You said: 'I have been looking at the boy!' Your expression told me again that you were not pleased with me. Without another word you departed. I can still hear your steps on the walk as you went away; they were so very firm."

"Yes, Jack, I can never forget." The tone was that of a man racked. "What else?" he asked. "Go on, Jack!"

"You know the life my mother and I led, study and play together. And that was the only time you saw me until I was fourteen. I was mortally in awe of you then and in awe of you the day I went West with your message to get strong. But I got strong; yes, strong, father!"

"Yes, Jack," said the father. "Yes, Jack, leave nothing unsaid—nothing!"

Now Jack swept back to the villa garden in Florence, the day of the Doge's call; and from there to the Doge's glance of recognition that first night in Little Rivers; then to the scene in front of the bookstore, when the Doge hesitated about going to see the Velasquez. He pictured the Doge's absorption over the mother's portrait; he repeated Mary's story on the previous evening.

All the while the profile, so dimly outlined in the outer darkness beyond the lamp's circle of light, to which he had been speaking, had not stirred. The father's cigar had gone out. It lay idly in his fingers, which rested on the arm of the chair, above a tiny pile of ashes on the rug. But there was no other sign of emotion, except his half affirmative interjections, with a confessional's encouragement to empty the mind of its every affliction.

"Why were my mother and myself always in exile? What was this barrier between you and her? Why was it that I never saw you? Why this bitterness of Jasper Ewold against you? Why should that bitterness be turned against me? I want to know, father, so that we can start afresh and right. I no longer want to be in the dark, with its mystery, but in the light, where I can grapple with the truth!"

There was no rancor, no crashing of sentences; only high tension in the finality of an inquiry in which hope and fear rose together.

"Yes, Jack!" exclaimed John Wingfield, Sr., after a silence in which he seemed to be passing all that Jack had said in review. "I am glad you have told me this; that you have come to the one to whom you should come in trouble. You have made it possible for me to speak of something that I never found a way to speak about, myself. For, Jack, you truly have been a stranger to me and I to you, thanks to the chain of influences which you have mentioned."

Very slowly John Wingfield, Sr. had turned in his chair. Distress was rising in his tone as he leaned toward Jack. His face under the rim of light of the lamp had a new charm, which was not that of the indulgent or flattering or winning smile, or the masterful set of his chin on an object. He seemed pallid and old, struggling against a phantom himself; almost pitiful, this man of strength, while his eyes looked into Jack's with limpid candor.

"Jack, I will tell you all I can," he said. "I want to. It is duty. It is relief. But first, will you tell me what your mother told you? What her reasons were? I have a right to know that, haven't I, in my effort to make my side clear?" He spoke in direct, intimate appeal.

Jack's lips were trembling and his whole nature was throbbing in a new-found sympathy. For the first time he saw his father as a man of sensitive feeling, capable of deep suffering. And he was to have the truth, all the truth, in kindness and affection.

"After you had left the house at Versailles," said Jack, "she took me in her arms and said that you were my father. 'Did you like him?' she asked; and I said no, realizing nothing but the childish impression of the interview. At that she was wildly, almost hysterically, triumphant. I was glad to have made her so happy. 'You are mine alone! You have only me!' she declared over and over again. 'And you must never ask me any questions, for that is best.' She never mentioned you afterward; and in all my life, until I was fourteen, I was never away from her."

Again the palm of John Wingfield, Sr.'s hand ran back and forth over his knee and the foot that was against the chair leg beat a nervous tattoo; while he drew a longer breath than usual, which might have been either of surprise or relief. His face fell back behind the rim of the lamp's rays, but he did not turn it away as he had when Jack was talking.

"You know only the Jasper Ewold who has been mellowed by time," he began. "His scholarship was a bond of companionship for you in the isolation of a small community. I know him as boy and young man. He was very precocious. At the age of eight, as I remember, he could read his Caesar. You will appreciate what that meant in a New England town—that he was somewhat spoiled by admiration. And, naturally, his character and mine were very different, thanks to the difference in our situations; for the Ewolds had a good deal of money in those days. I was the type of boy who was ready to work at any kind of odd job in order to get dimes and quarters for my little bank.

"Well, it is quite absurd to go back to that as the beginning of Jasper Ewold's feelings toward me; but one day young Wingfield felt that young Ewold was patronizing him. We had a turn at fisticuffs which resulted in my favor. Jasper was a proud boy, and he never quite forgave me. In fact, he was not used to being crossed. Learning was easy for him; he was good-looking; he had an attractive manner, and it seemed only his right that all doors should open when he knocked. Soon after our battle he went away to school. Not until we were well past thirty did our paths cross again. He was something of a painter, but he really had had no set purpose in life except the pleasures of his intellectual diversions. I will not say that he was wild, but at least he had lived in the abundant freedom of his opportunities. He fell in love at the same time that I did with Alice Jamison. You have seen your mother's picture, but that gives you little idea of her beauty in girlhood."

"I have always thought her beautiful!" Jack exclaimed spontaneously.

"Yes. I am glad. She always was beautiful to me; but I like best to think of her before she turned against me. I like to think of her as she was in the days of our courtship. Fortune favored me instead of Jasper Ewold. I can well understand the blow it was to him, that she should take the storekeeper, the man without learning, the man without family, as people supposed then, when he thought that she belonged entirely to his world. But his enmity thereafter I can only explain by his wounded pride; by a mortal defeat for one used to having his way, for one who had never known discipline. Your mother and I were very happy for a time. I thought that she loved me and had chosen me because I was a man of purpose, while Jasper Ewold was not."

John Wingfield, Sr. spoke deliberately, measuring his thought before he put it into words, as if he were trying to set himself apart as one figure in a drama while he aimed to do exact justice to the others.

"It was soon after you were born that your mother's attitude changed. She was, as you know, supersensitive, and whatever her grievances were she kept them to herself. My immersion in my affairs was such that I could not be as attentive to her as I ought to have been. Sometimes I thought that the advertisement with our name in big letters in every morning paper might be offensive to her; again, that she missed in me the education I had had to forfeit in youth, and that my affection could hardly take its place. I know that Jasper Ewold saw her occasionally, and in his impulse I know that he said things about me that were untrue. But that I pass over. In his place I, too, might have been bitter.

"The best explanation I can find of your mother's change toward me is one that belongs in the domain of psychology and pathology. She suffered a great deal at your birth and she never regained her former strength. When she rose from her bed it was with a shadow over her mind. I saw that she was unhappy and nervous in my presence. Indeed, I had at times to face the awful sensation of feeling that I was actually repugnant to her. She was especially irritable if I kissed or fondled you. She dropped all her friends; she never made calls; she refused to see callers. I consulted specialists and all the satisfaction I had was that she was of a peculiarly high-strung nature and that in certain phases of melancholia, where there is no complete mental and physical breakdown, the patient turns on the one whom she would hold nearest and dearest if she were normal. The child that had taken her strength became the virtual passion of her worship, which she would share with no one.

"When she proposed to go to Europe for a rest, taking you with her, I welcomed the idea. I rejoiced in the hope that the doctors held out that she would come back well, and I ventured to believe in a happy future, with you as our common object of love and care. But she never returned, as you know; and she only wrote me once, a wild sort of letter about what a beautiful boy you were and that she had you and I had the store and I was never to send her any more remittances.

"I made a number of trips to Europe. I could not go frequently, because in those days, Jack, I was a heavy borrower of money in the expansion of my business, and only one who has built up a great business can understand how, in the earlier and more uncertain period of our banking credits, the absence of personal attention in any sudden crisis might throw you on the rocks. Naturally, when I went I wrote to Alice that I was coming; but I always found that she had gone and left no address for forwarding mail from the CrÉdit Lyonnais. Once when I went without writing she eluded me, and the second time I found that she had a cottage at Versailles. That, as you know, was the only occasion when I ever saw you or her until I came to bring you home after her sudden death."

"Yes," Jack whispered starkly. "That day I had left her as well as usual and came home to find her lying still and white on a couch, her book fallen out of her hand onto the floor and—" the words choked in his throat.

"And the stranger, your father, who came for you seemed very hard and forbidding to you!"

"Yes," Jack managed to say.

"But, Jack, when my steps sounded so firm the day I left you at Versailles it was the firmness of force of will fighting to accept the inevitable. For I had seen your face. It was like mine, and yet I had to give you up! I had to give you up knowing that I might not see you again; knowing that this tragic, incomprehensible fatality had set you against me; knowing that any further efforts to see you meant only pain for Alice and for me. Whatever happiness she knew came from you, and that she should have. And remember, Jack, that out of all this tragedy I, too, had my point of view. I had my moments of reproach against fate; my moments of bitterness and anger; my moments when I set all my mind with, volcanic energy into my affairs in order to forget my misfortune. I had to build for the sake of building. Perhaps that hardened me.

"When you came home I saw that you were mine in blood but not mine in heart. All your training had been foreign, all of estrangement from the business and the ways of the home-country; which you could not help, I could not help, nothing now could help. But, after all, I had been building for you; that was my new solace. I wanted you to be equal to what was coming to you, and that change meant discipline. To be frank with you, as you have been with me, you were sickly, hectic, dreamy; and when word came that you must go to the desert if your life were to be saved—well, Jack, I had to put affection aside and consider this blow for what it was, and think not of kind words but of what was best for you and your future. I knew that my duty to you and your duty to yourself was to see you become strong, and for your sake you must not return until you were strong.

"Now, as for the scene in the drawing-room the other day: I could not forget what Jasper Ewold had said of me. That was one thing. Another was that I had detected his influence over you; an influence against the purpose and steadiness that I was trying to inculcate in you; and suddenly coming upon him in my own house, in view of his enmity and the way in which he had spoken about me, I was naturally startled and indignant and withdrew to avoid a scene. That is all, Jack. I have answered your questions to the best of my knowledge. If others occur to you I will try my best to answer them, too;" and the father seemed ready to submit every recess of his mind to the son's inquisition.

"You have answered everything," said Jack; "everything—fairly, considerately, generously."

There was a flash of triumph in the father's eyes. Slowly he rose and stood with his finger-ends caressing the blotting-pad. Jack rose at the same time, his movement automatic, instinctively in sympathy with his father's. His head was bowed under stress of the emotion, incapable of translation into language, which transfixed him. It had all been made clear, this thing that no one could help. His feeling toward his mother could never change; but penetrating to the depths in which it had been held sacred was a new feeling. The pain that had brought him into the world had brought misery to the authors of his being. There was no phantom except the breath of life in his nostrils which they had given him.

Watchfully, respecting the son's silence, the father's lips tightened, his chin went out slightly and his brows drew together in a way that indicated that he did not consider the battle over. At length, Jack's head came up and his face had the strength of a youthful replica of the ancestor's, radiant in gratitude, and in his eyes for the first time, in looking into his father's, were trust and affection. There was no word, no other demonstration except the steady, liquid look that spoke the birth of a great, understanding comradeship. The father fed his hunger for possession, which had been irresistibly growing in him for the last two months, on that look. He saw his son's strength as something that had at last become malleable; and this was the moment when the metal was at white heat, ready for knowing turns with the pincers and knowing blows of the hammer.

The message from Jim Galway was still on the table where the father had laid it after reading. Now he pressed his fingers on it so hard that the nails became a row of red spots.

"And the telegram, Jack?" he asked.

Jack stared at the yellow slip of paper as the symbol of problems that reappeared with burning acuteness in his mind. It smiled at him in the satire of John Prather triumphing in Little Rivers. It visualized pictures of lean ranchers who had brought him flowers in the days of his convalescence; of children gathered around him on the steps of his bungalow; of all the friendly faces brimming good-will into his own on the day of his departure; of a patch of green in desert loneliness, with a summons to arms to defend its arteries of life.

"They want me to help—I half promised!" he said.

"Yes. And just how can you help?" asked his father, gently.

"Why, that is not quite clear yet. But a stranger, they made me one of themselves. They say that they need me. And, father, that thrilled me. It thrilled the idler to find that there was some place where he could be of service; that there was some one definite thing that others thought he could do well!"

The father proceeded cautiously, reasonably, with his questions, as one who seeks for light for its own sake. Jack's answers were luminously frank. For there was always to be truth between them in their new fellowship, unfettered by hopes or vagaries.

"You could help with your knowledge of law? With political influence?
Help these men seasoned by experience in land disputes in that region?"

"No!"

"And would Jasper Ewold, whom I understand is the head and founder of the community, want you to come? Has he asked you?" the father continued, drawing in the web of logic.

"On the contrary, he would not want me."

"And Miss Ewold? Would she want you?"

There Jack hesitated. When he spoke, however, it was to admit the fact that was stabbing him.

"No, she would not. She has dismissed me. But—but I half promised," he added, his features setting firmly as they had after Leddy had fired at him. "It seems like duty, unavoidable."

The metal was cooling, losing its malleability, and the father proceeded to thrust it back into the furnace.

"Then, I take it that your value to Little Rivers is your cool hand with a gun," he said, "and the summons is to uncertainties which may lead to something worse than a duel. You are asked to come because you can fight. Do you want to go for that? To go to let the devil, as you call it, out of you?"

Now the metal was soft with the heat of the shame of the moment when Jack had called to Leddy, "I am going to kill you!" and of the moment when he saw Pedro Nogales's limp, broken arm and ghastly face.

"No, no!" Jack gasped. "I want no fight! I never want to draw a bead on a man again! I never want to have a revolver in my hand again!"

He was shuddering, half leaning against the desk for support. His father waited in observant comprehension. Convulsively, Jack straightened with desperation and all the impassioned pleading to Mary on the pass was in his eyes.

"But the thing that I cannot help—the transcendent thing, not of logic, not of Little Rivers' difficulties—how am I to give that up?" he cried.

"Miss Ewold, you mean?"

"Yes!"

"Jack, I know! I understand! Who should understand if not I?" The father drew Jack's hand into his own, and the fluid force of his desire for mastery was flowing out from his finger-ends into the son's fibres, which were receptively sensitive to the caress. "I know what it is when the woman you love dismisses you! You have her to think of as well as yourself. Your own wish may not be lord. You may not win that which will not be won"—how well he knew that!—"either by protest, by persistence, or by labor. You are dealing with the tender and intangible; with feminine temperament, Jack. And, Jack, it is wise for you, isn't it, to bear in mind that your life has not been normal? With the switch from desert to city life homesickness has crept over you. From to-night things will not be so strange, will they? But if you wish a change, go to Europe—yes, go, though I cannot bear to think of losing you the very moment that we have come to know each other; when the past is clear and amends are at hand.

"And, Jack, if your mother were here with us and were herself, would she want you to go back to take up a rifle instead of your work at my side? I do not pretend to understand Jasper Ewold's or Mary Ewold's thoughts. She has preferred to make another generation's ill-feeling her own in a thing that concerns her life alone. She has seen enough of you to know her mind. For, from all I hear, you have not been a faint-hearted lover. Is it fair to her to follow her back to the desert? Is it the courage of self-denial, of control of impulse on your part? Would your mother want you to persist in a veritable conquest by force of your will, whose strength you hardly realize, against Mary Ewold's sensibilities? And if you broke down her will, if you won, would there be happiness for you and for her? Jack, wait! If she cares for you, if there is any germ of love for you in her, it will grow of itself. You cannot force it into blossom. Come, Jack, am I not right?"

Jack's hands lay cold and limp in his father's; so limp that it seemed only a case of leading, now. Yet there was always the uncertain in the boy; the uncertain hovering under that face of ashes that the father was so keenly watching; a face so clearly revealing the throes of a struggle that sent cold little shivers into his father's warm grasp. Jack's eyes were looking into the distance through a mist. He dropped the lids as if he wanted darkness in which to think. When he raised them it was to look in his father's eyes firmly. There was a half sob, as if this sentimentalist, this SeÑor Don't Care, had wrung determination from a precipice edge, even as Mary Ewold had. He gripped his father's hands strongly and lifted them on a level with his breast.

"You have been very fine, father! I want you to be patient and go on helping me. The trail is a rough one, but straight, now. I—I'm too brimming full to talk!" And blindly he left the library.

When the door closed, John Wingfield, Sr. seized the telegram, rolled it up with a glad, fierce energy and threw it into the waste-basket. His head went up; his eyes became points of sharp flame; his lips parted in a smile of relief and triumph and came together in a straight line before he sank down in his chair in a collapse of exhaustion. After a while he had the decanter brought in; he gulped a glass of brandy, lighted another cigar, and, swinging around, fell back at ease, his mind a blank except for one glowing thought:

"He will not go! He will give up the girl! He is to be all mine!"

It is said that the best actors never go on the stage. They play real parts in private life, making their own lines as they watch the other players. One of this company, surveying the glint of his bookcases, was satisfied with the greatest effort of his life in his library.