In keeping with his promise to Dr. Bennington he had wired to his father, naming his train; and in a few minutes Wingfield, Sr. and Wingfield, Jr. would meet for the first time in five years.  Jack was conscious of a faster beating of his heart and a feeling of awesome expectancy as the crowd debouched from the ferryboat.  At the exit to the street a big limousine was waiting.  The gilt initials on the door left no doubt for whom it had been sent.  But there was no one to meet him, no one after his long absence except a chauffeur and a footman, who glanced at Jack sharply.  After the exchange of a corroborative nod between them the footman advanced.

“If you please, Mr. Wingfield,” he said, taking Jack’s suit case.

“What would Jim Galway think of me now!” thought Jack.  He put his head inside the car cautiously.  “Another box!” he thought, this time aloud.

“You have the check for it, sir?” asked the footman, thinking that Jack was using the English of the mother island for trunk.

“No.  That’s all my baggage.”

In the tapering, cut-glass vase between the two front window-panels of the “box” was a rose—­a symbol of the luxury of the twenty millions, evidently put there regularly every morning by direction of their master.  Its freshness and color appealed to Jack.  He took it out and pressed it to his nostrils.

“Just needs the morning sun and the dew to be perfect,” he said to the amazed attendants; “and I will walk if you will take the suit case to the house.”

He kept the rose, which he twirled in his fingers as he sauntered across town, now pausing at curb corners to glance back in thoughtful survey, now looking aloft at the peaks of Broadway which lay beyond the foothills of the river-front avenues.

“All to me what the desert is to other folks!” he mused; “desert, without any cacti or mesquite!  All the trails cross one another in a maze.  A boxed-up desert—­boxes and boxes piled on top of one another!  Everybody in harness and attached by an invisible, unbreakable, inelastic leash to a box, whither he bears his honey or goes to nurse his broken wings!—­so it seems to me and very headachy!”

At Madison Square he was at the base of the range itself; and halting on the corner of Twenty-third Street and the Avenue he was a statue as aloof as the statue of Farragut from his surroundings.  Salt sea spray ever whispers in the atmosphere around the old sailor.  How St. Gaudens created it and keeps it there in the heart of New York is his secret.  Possibly the sculptor put some of his soul into it as young Michael Angelo did into his young David.