t Jasper Ewold had met me somewhere
before. But--" he went on after going back to the incident of the villa
in his childhood--"that hardly explained. How could he remember the face
of a grown man from the face of a boy? Jasper Ewold! Do you recall ever
having met him? He must have known my mother. Perhaps he knew you, though
why he should not have told me I don't know."

"Yes, yes--Jasper Ewold," said the father. "I knew him in his younger
days. His was an old family up in Burbridge, the New England town where I
came from. Too much college, too much travel, as I remember,
characterized Jasper Ewold. No settled point of view; and I judge from
what you say that he must have run through his patrimony. One of the ups
and downs of the world, Jack. And he never mentioned that he had met me?"

"No."

"Probably a part of that desert notion of freemasonry in keeping pasts a
secret. But why did you stay on after you had recovered from your wound?"
he asked penetratingly, though he was looking again at the bottom of his
coffee-cup.

"For a reason that comes to a man but once in his life!" Jack answered.

Had the father looked up--it was a habit of his in listening to any
report to lower his eyes, his face a mask--he might have seen Jack's
face in the supremacy of emotion, as it was when he had called up to
Mary from the canyon and when he had pleaded with her on the pass. But
John Wingfield, Sr. could not mistake the message of a voice vibrating
with all the force of a being let free living over the scene. With the
shadows settling over his eyes, Jack came to her answer and to the
finality of her cry:

"It's not in the blood!"

The only sound was a slight tinkle of a spoon against the coffee-cup.
Looking at his father he saw a nervous flutter in his cheeks, his lips
hard set, his brow drawn down; and the rigidity of the profile was such
that Jack was struck by the shiver of a thought that it must have been
like his own as others said it was when he had gripped Pedro Nogales's
arm. But this passed quickly, leaving, however, in its trail an
expression of shock and displeasure.

"So it was the girl, that kept you--you were in love!" John Wingfield,
Sr. exclaimed, tensely.

"Yes, I was--I am! You have it, father, the unchangeable all of it! I
face a wall of mystery. 'It's not in the blood!' she said, as if it were
some bar sinister. What could she have meant?"

In the fever of baffled intensity crying for light and help, h