d. He was mutely asking her help, asking the support
of her frail, feminine courage for his masculine courage in the battle
before him; and little tremors of nervous determination were running
through him, when he heard his father's footstep and became conscious of
his father's presence in the doorway.

There was a moment, not of hesitation but of completing a thought, before
he looked up and rose to his feet. In that moment, John Wingfield, Sr.
had his own shock over the change in the room. The muscles of his face
twitched in irritation, as if his wife's very frailty were baffling
invulnerability. Straightening his features into a mask, his eyes still
spoke his emotion in a kind of stare of resentment at the picture.

Then he saw his son's shoulders rising above his own and looked into
his son's eyes to see them smiling. Long isolated by his power from
clashes of will under the roof of his store or his house, the father
had a sense of the rippling flash of steel blades. A word might start a
havoc of whirling, burning sentences, confusing and stifling as a
desert sandstorm; or it might bring a single killing flash out of
gathering clouds.

Thus the two were facing each other in a silence oppressive to both,
which neither knew how to break, when relief came in the butler's
announcement of dinner. Indeed, by such small, objective interruptions do
dynamic inner impulses hang that this little thing may have suppressed
the lightnings.

The father was the first to speak. He hoped that a first day in New York
had brought Jack a good appetite; certainly, he could see that the store
had given him a wonderful fit for a rush order.

XXVII

BY RIGHT OF ANCESTRY

There were to be no stories of Little Rivers at dinner; no questions
asked about desert life. This chapter of Jack's career was a past rung of
the ladder to John Wingfield, Sr. who was ever looking up to the rungs
above. The magnetism and charm with which he won men to his service now
turned to the immediate problem of his son, whom he was to refashion
according to his ideas.

"Are you ready to settle down?" he asked, half fearful lest that scene in
the drawing-room might have wrought a change of purpose.

In answer he was seeing another Jack; a Jack relaxed, amiable,
even amenable.

"If you have the patience," said Jack. "You know, father, I haven't a
cash-register mind. I'm starting out on a new trail and I am likely to go
lame at times. But I mean to