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 affection on Jack’s entrance.  He had a desire to grip the brown hand that was on the edge of the desk fingering the rose stem; but the lateness of the demonstration, its futility in making up for his previous neglect, and some subtle influence radiating from Jack’s person, restrained him.  It was apparent that Jack might sit on in silence indefinitely; in a desert silence.

“Well, Jack, I hear you had a ranch,” said the father, with a faint effort at jocularity.

“Yes, and a great crop of alfalfa,” answered Jack, happily.

“And it seems that all the time you were away you have never used your allowance, so it has just been piling up for you.”

“I didn’t need it.  I had quite sufficient from the income of my mother’s estate.”

“Yes—­your mother—­I had forgotten!”

“Naturally, I preferred to use that, when I was of so little service to you unless I got strong, as you said,” Jack said, very quietly.

Now came another silence, the silence of luminous, unsounded depths concealing that in the mind which has never been spoken or even taken form.  Jack’s garden of words had dried up, as his ranch would dry up for want of water.  He rose to go, groping for something that should express proper contrition for wasted years, but it refused to come.  He picked up the rose and the hat, while the father regarded him with stony wonder which said:  “Are you mine, or are you not?  What is the nature of this new strength?  On what will it turn?”

For Jack’s features had set with a strange firmness and his eyes, looking into his father’s, had a steady light.  It seemed as if he might stalk out of the office forever, and nothing could stop him.  But suddenly he flashed his smile; he had looked about searching for a talisman and found it in the rose, which set his garden of words abloom again.

“This room is so bare it must be lonely for you,” he said.  “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to cheer it up a bit?  To have this rose in a vase on your table where you could see it, instead of riding about in an empty automobile box?”