had marched into a study unawares.

Jack was waiting, waiting and smiling, for his father to speak. In a
swift survey, his features transfixed at first with astonishment, then
glowing with pride, the father half rose from his chair, as if in an
impulse to embrace the prodigal. But he paused. He felt that something
under his control was getting out of his control. He felt that he had
been tricked. The boy must have been well for a long time. Yes! But he
was well! That was the vital point. He was well, and magnificent in
his vigor.

The father made another movement; and still Jack was waiting, inquiring
yet not advancing. And John Wingfield, Sr. wished that he had gone to
the station; he wished that he had paid a visit to Arizona. This thought
working in his mind supplied Jack's attitude with an aspect which made
the father hesitate and then drop back into his chair, confused and
uncertain for the first time in his own office.

"Well, Jack, you--you surely do look cured!" he said awkwardly. "You see,
I--I was a little surprised to see you at the office. I sent the
limousine for you, thinking you would want to go straight to the house
and wash off the dust of travel. Didn't you connect?"

"Yes, thank you, father--and when you didn't meet me--"

"I--I was very busy. I meant to, but something interrupted--I--" The
father stopped, confounded by his own hesitation.

"Of course," said Jack. He spoke deferentially, understandingly. "I know
how busy you always are."

Yet the tone was such to John Wingfield, Sr.'s ears that he eyed Jack
cautiously, sharply, in the expectancy that almost any kind of
undisciplined force might break loose from this muscular giant whom he
was trying to reconcile with the Jack whom he had last seen.

"I thought I'd stretch my legs, so I came over to the store to see how it
had grown," said Jack. "I don't interrupt--for a moment?"

He sat down on the chair opposite his father's and laid his faded
cowpuncher hat and the rose on the desk. They looked odd in the company
of the pushbuttons and the pile of papers in that neutral-toned room
which was chilling in its monotony of color. And though Jack was almost
boyishly penitent, in the manner of one who comes before parental
authority after he has been in mischief, still John Wingfield, Sr.
could not escape the dead weight of an impression that he was speaking to
a stranger and not to his own flesh and blood. He wished now that he had
shown affecti