did have fanciful ideas, Jack."

"Yes, I suppose I have!" he said, with some surprise and very
thoughtfully. "I suppose that I was born with them and never weeded
them out."

"No doubt!" and the father frowned.

Surveying the broad shoulders before him, he was thinking how nothing but
aimlessness and fantasies and everything out of harmony with the career
to come had been encouraged in the son. But he saw soberness coming into
Jack's eyes and with it the pressure of a certain resoluteness of
purpose. And now Jack spoke again, a trifle sadly, as if guessing his
father's thoughts.

"It will be a case of weeding for me in the future, won't it?" he asked
wanly, as he rose. "I am full of foolish ideas that are just bound to run
away with me."

"Jack! Jack!" John Wingfield, Sr. put his hands out to the shoulders
of his son and gripped them strongly, and for a second let his own
weight half rest on that sturdy column which he sensed under the grip.
His pale face, the paleness of the type that never tans, flushed.
"Jack, come!" he said.

He permitted himself something like real dramatic feeling as he signalled
his son to follow him out of the office and led the way to a corner of
one of the balconies where, under the light from the glass roof of the
great central court, he could see down the tiers of floors to the jewelry
counter which sparkled at the bottom of the well.

"Look! look!" he exclaimed, rubbing his palms together with a peculiar
crisp sound. "All selling my goods! All built from the little store where
I began as a clerk!"

"It's--it's immense!" gasped Jack; and he felt a dizziness and confusion
in gazing at this kind of an abyss.

"And it's only beginning! It's to go on growing and growing! You see why
I wanted you to be strong, Jack; why it would not do to be weak if you
had all this responsibility."

This was a form of apology for his farewell to Jack, but the message was
the same: He had not wanted a son who should be of his life and heart and
ever his in faults and illnesses. This was the recognizable one of the
shadows between them now recalled. He had wanted a fresh physical machine
into which he could blow the breath of his own masterful being and instil
the cunning of his experience. He saw in this straight, clean-limbed
youth at his side the hope of Jack's babyhood fulfilled, in the
projection of his own ego as a living thing after he himself was gone.

"And it is to go on growing and growin